[Peace-discuss] Durbin's cowardice

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Durbin's cowardly tergiversation looks like the closest the
Democrats will come for a while to mentioning the torture and
illegal imprisonment scandals. --CGE]


  Durbin’s Gitmo Faux Pas Only Scratched the Surface
  Thursday June 23rd 2005, 8:56 am

It appears Dick Durbin (now fondly called “Dick Turban” by the
racist and xenophobic wingers) changed his mind about
Guantanamo after an abrasive comment from Chicago’s mayor.
“Daley’s off-the-cuff criticism Tuesday morning forced a
change of strategy,” reports the Chicago Sun-Times. “Daley’s
strong words came at the end of a Navy Pier press conference
to promote a new anti-prostitution policy, listing the names
of alleged johns on a Chicago Police Web site.” (Interesting.
Chicago humiliates people before they have had their day in
court, sort of the way people are humiliated at Guantanamo
sans due process. Excuse me for noticing a pattern here.)
“It’s a disgrace and [Durbin] is a good friend of mine,” Daley
told the media. “But I think it’s a disgrace to say that any
man or woman in the military acts like [Nazis] or that a
report is like that. You go and talk to some victims of the
Holocaust, and they will tell you horror stories and there are
not horror stories like that in Guantanamo Bay.” Of course,
Durbin never said “our troops” are Nazis, nor did he
specifically affix blame to the Pentagon, CIA, or any number
of mercenary contractors. He simply said the stories of
torture reminded him of something the Nazis would do. In
Bushzarro world, that is enough to get you roasted alive.

Meanwhile, as the wingers froth and fume over Durbin’s comment
(based on an FBI report), a British lawyer, Clive
Stafford-Smith, told al-Jazeera about the abuse of his client,
Sami al-Hajj, an al-Jazeera journalist, held illegally at
Gitmo. “Sami has endured horrendous abuse—sexual abuse and
religious persecution,” explained Stafford-Smith from Qatar.
“He has been beaten. He had a huge scar on his face when I saw
him…. He is completely innocent. He is about as much of a
terrorist as my granddad. The only reason he has been treated
like he has is because he is an Aljazeera journalist. The
Americans have tried to make him an informant with the goal of
getting him to say that Aljazeera is linked to al-Qaida.”

As Stafford-Smith points out, Gitmo is but a minor league camp
in Bush’s larger torture and sexual humiliation gulag. “What
George Bush says about Guantanamo is absolute rubbish. He has
never been there himself and he should go there and take a
visit to see what it is really like. But we must remember that
Guantanamo is just a diversion. It only holds a few hundred
inmates while there are around 30 secret US detention centers
around the world which hold up to 12,000 inmates. Conditions
are worse there than in Guantanamo.”

John McCain urged Dick Durbin to read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag
Archipelago. Not a bad idea, considering what the U.S. plans
to do at Gitmo. “One plan under consideration is for the US to
build a new prison at Guantanamo,” writes Matthew Rothschild.
“The Pentagon is expected to ask Congress for $25 million for
construction. ‘The new prison, dubbed Camp 6, would allow
inmates more comfort and freedom than they have now, and would
be designed for prisoners the government believes have no more
intelligence to share,’ [a Washington Post] story said….
Another plan is to send these detainees back to their home
countries but to stash them in new US-built prisons there,
which would be run by the local government.” In other words,
the detainees (abductees), some who were children when
snatched, and most who never did anything and are not members
of the phantom al-Qaeda, would be punished for the rest of
their lives.

Sounds like a Solzhenitsyn gulag to me.

--<http://kurtnimmo.com/blog/?p=764>