The Moral of Durbin's Story

Senator Durbin of Illinois created a little bit of controversy this week with his unfortunate choice of words.

In a Senate floor speech Tuesday, Durbin cited an FBI report describing Guantanamo Bay prisoners chained to the floor in the fetal position without food or water and sometimes in extreme temperatures.

"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," he said, "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."

By yesterday, Durbin found himself under attack from leading Republicans and their conservative allies. White House press secretary Scott McClellan, asked about the statement, responded by saying: "I think the senator's remarks are reprehensible. It's a real disservice to our men and women in uniform who adhere to high standards and uphold our values and our laws."

McClellan, as he so often does, turns this issue on its head. What does a real disservice to our military personnel who "adhere to high standards" are those military personnel and members of the civilian leadership who do not. Here's the quote from the FBI report that Durbin read on the Senate floor:

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 [air conditioner] 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.

Pretty high standards, no?

But you would think by now that anyone who has a serious point to make would know to avoid any and all comparisons to Hitler or the Nazis. As soon as a link to the Nazis is made, that link becomes the issue, and the original argument gets lost in the outrage. Thus in the multitude of angry stories and posts in the right-wing press and blogosphere I looked at this morning, I could not find one that included the quote from the FBI report. Sure, they all quoted Durbin dropping the N-bomb, but not the description of abuse that prompted the use of that word in the first place. All of which feeds that essential wingnut distortion that it's not the facts that matter, but rather how one talks about those facts.

But for those people for whom the facts do matter, Durbin's central point is a good one, and it bears repeating:

To win the war on terrorism, we must remain true to the principles upon which our country was founded. This administration's detention and interrogation policies are placing our troops at risk and making it harder to combat terrorism.

That's the true moral of this sad story.