Can someone post Durbin's EXACT quote

[maxsolomon]

the one causing the outrage?

i remember it seemed pretty reasonable.

[Eric J in MN]

1. here

http://www.thismodernworld.com/weblog/mtarchives/week_2005_06_12.html#002256

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here --I almost hesitate to put them in the Record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

[maxsolomon]

2. ok. what's to apologize for?

he's 100% right, and he's not calling any one person, or groups of people, nazis. he's saying the actions demean our nation & its laws.

i guess "nazi" is the magic word. pitiful. jesus, use your spine!

[Eric J in MN]

3. Exactly. He's talking about actions and

critics and even supposedly-neutral press reports say he said the guards at Gitmo are like Nazis.

[jackstraw45]

4. Unless your name is Santorum...

Our party is in serious trouble.

[Igel]

5. Oh, that was done in the GULags.

But that was mild.

Along with forcing prisoners to amputate healthy limbs from other amputees, or making sure inmates lost limbs from frostbite and gangrene; hard physical labor for 12-18 hour days with almost no food, then keeping them up all night forcing them to confess, but not saying what to confess to. Forged signed confessions that implicated other prisoners would be leaked to inmates. Then, in the morning, back to work. "Cold" typically meant below zero ... You could be killed for your clothing or boots. Electrical shock and burning that disfigures. Hurl feces at a guard ... having your Qur'an put on the bed is the least of your worries. Being made to wet yourself or shit your pants because you couldn't get to the bathroom? Try intentional pain and terror so that you do it involuntarily.

Guards would gang rape prisoners, or pay off prisoners to gang rape other prisoners, sometimes until they died. Prisoners would be forced to publicly have sex with each other. I read one description in which it was required that it be done specifically until the guy dies--else the other prisoners would suffer badly. I'm not sure what threat or abuse would make me willing to rape a fellow prisoner ... to death. Then again, some of the prisoners were just common criminals, not everybody was a writer or political dissident.

Jews would routinely be fed pork ... in some instances, they'd be begging for it. Allowed off for sabbath prayers ... not bloody likely. The food in general was bad ... rotten; extreme humiliation and degradation was a good day. Merely reciting a Bible passage could easily get you severely beaten. Possession of a Bible ... zhutko.

The death rate was phenomenal in some of the camps. Political prisoners--teachers, writers, poets--had the highest deathrate--they weren't able to defend themselves. In other camps, it wasn't quite so bad: there was a hierarchy. And Stalin relied on the camps for their output. Solzhenitsyn cringed when he was told how horrorific his descriptions were: he knew he was never in a bad one, and referred people to descriptions of bad camps. And yet Gitmo pales compared to Solzhenitsyn's tales. Abu Ghraib ... on the worst day sounds like a particulary poorly run GULag camp, or a middle-of-the-road one. Litvinov's oped piece a couple of days ago in the WaPo was dead on.

Then there was the academic camp. You're a scientist, you don't want to do what the government wants, into the camp with you. You're in the system: the good camp, the mediocre camp, or the hellish camp ... doesn't matter, you're gone as far as the outside is concerned. Your wife and kids are in the same camp or another one ... cooperate, or you can join them in a hellish camp. Fall behind in what's expected, and they can go to a mediocre camp until you catch up ... but what happens to them there is beyond the control of *your* guards (nudge-nudge), and only you are responsible. If you don't cooperate, well, you didn't want to anyway.

When we blur the line between the truly horrible and the horrible, whether out of partisanship or ignorance, we lose the language and conceptual structures necessary to draw the necessary distinctions when things are really bad. Abu Ghraib was moderately bad; punish the people involved. Gitmo doesn't begin rise to that level. What's done there isn't right, but it's rather like yelling "fire! fire!" in a concert hall because somebody raised a lighter.

[maxsolomon]

6. i'm sorry, i thought that WAS the american way

if overreaction & hyperbole don't have a home in the US senate, where do they get to reside?

remember, in america there are no grey areas. you are with us or against us. might i remind you of some of america's favorite abosolutes?

1. marijuana is a schedule 1 narcotic.
2. even 1 sip of alcohol or 1 puff of tobacco during a pregnancy will result in hideous deformities.

when anyone on the mildly-left acutally THINKS about their words, then apologizes, we let the fascists move forward 1 space. conversely, they have no allegiance to the truth. in fact, they have actively worked to debase & discredit truth. and we're the ones using irresponsible rhetoric?

if america can come out of this neo-fascist era, which is really just starting, without creating ACTUAL gulags, i'll be shocked. once the oil goes, you think the right, who control the media, the state religion, and 90% of the guns, will be more accomodating to our opinions?

[Igel]

7. I prefer to be reality based.

Not hyperbole based.

When hyperbole is recognized by 95% of the public as hyperbole, it does its job.

When it's taken by 95% of the public as fact, it's demagoguery. I draw the hyperbole/demagoguery line somewhere between those two numbers, but I'm not quite sure where.

I was a amateur Sovietologist back in the late '70s and early '80s, and wondered at the tales of horror that escaped from the GULags. Then, under Gorbachev, even worse tales of horror were published and came to light from the limited access to the archives that he allowed. Then, after the USSR broke up, the archives were opened wide ... and the true horror became know.

But everybody in the US stopped paying attention when Gorbachev was in power, and even Solzhenitsyn's mild tales quickly vanished down the collective memory hole. Since then, Americans have, by and large, blotted out how bad the GULags were. And Putin's sealed many of the archives ... some "temporarily" (but they're still sealed, months after they were to be reopened), some "indefinitely".