I’m a little bemused by some of the emails saying that I’ve gone crazy about Dick Durbin. They’re missing an important nuance. If Durbin had said, as Amnesty unfortunately did, that Gitmo was another Gulag, I’d be dismayed and critical, as I was with Amnesty. There’s no comparison in any way between the scale, intent and context of the Soviet gulags and Gitmo. If Durbin had said that what was being done there in the aggregate was comparable to Auschwitz or Siberian death camps, the same would be true. But Durbin said something subtler. Now I know subtlety is not something that plays well on talk radio. But in this case, it matters. Durbin focused on one very credible account of inhumane treatment and abuse of detainees (see below) and asked an important question:
“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.”
So go ahead: answer his implied question. If you had been told that prisoners had been found in this state in one of Saddam’s or Stalin’s jails, would you have believed it? Of course, you would. In fact, I spent much time and effort before the war documenting the cruel and inhumane conduct of the regime we were trying to destroy – a regime whose cruelty encompassed low-level inhumanity like Gitmos – and, of course, unimaginably worse.
ONE ACT AT A TIME: When you read the account Durbin was citing you notice an important thing: the detainees were thoroughly dehumanized, robbed of any personal dignity, left in extremes of heat and cold, shackled, covered in their own urine and excrement, with one having apparently torn parts of his hair out, and left without food or water for up to 24 sleepless hours. Durbin could have quoted worse incidents – and there are many, far worse cases – but he wanted to ensure that his incident was testified by an FBI official. The moral question that Durbin is absolutely right to raise is a simple one: two years ago, would you have ever believed that the United States would be guilty of such a dehumanized treatment of a prisoner in its care? If the particulars had been changed, would you have believed that such a thing could have happened in a totalitarian regime’s prison? Does the way in which human beings have been completely robbed of dignity, treated cruelly and turned figuratively into “barking dogs” shock your conscience? The moral question is not simply of degree – how widespread and systematic is this kind of inhumanity? It is of kind: is this the kind of behavior more associated with despots than with democracies? Of course it is. When a country starts treating its prisoners like animals, it has lost its moral bearings; and, in the case of the United States, is also breaking its own laws (and, in this case, the president has declared himself above the law). I don’t know about Hugh Hewitt, Bill Kristol or NR, but I supported this war in large part because I wanted to end torture, abuse and cruelty in Iraq. I did not support it in order, two and a half years later, to be finding specious rhetorical justifications for torture, abuse and cruelty by Americans. I’m sick of hearing justifications that the enemy is worse. This is news? This is what now passes for analysis? They are far, far worse, among the most despicable and evil enemies we have ever faced. Our treatment of their prisoners is indeed Club Med compared to their fathomless barbarism. But since when is our moral compass set by them? The West is a civilization built on a very fragile web of law and humanity. We do not treat people in our custody as animals. We do not justify it. We do not change the subject. We do not accuse those highlighting it of aiding the enemy. We do not joke about it. We simply don’t do it. This administration – by design, improvisation, desperation, arrogance, incompetence, and wilfull blindness – has enabled this to occur. They must be held accountable until this cancer is rooted out for good. It has metastasized enough already.
The Dish 