Political Humor | Sen. Durbin Speaks Out

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) had these kind words to say on Tuesday::

” 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.

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.”

Did Sen. Durbin really mean to compare the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to this:

A German police officer shoots Jewish women still alive after a mass execution of Jews from the Mizocz ghetto, Poland, October 14, 1942.

Dachau

Mass Grave at Nazi Camp

Soviet Gulag

Exhumation at Choeung Ek
(photographed in 1980 by Ben Kiernan, former director of the Cambodia Genocide Project)

Khmer Rouge Victims

If he did intend to make a real apples to apples comparison between the two, I somehow missed the similarities. Go figure.

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