[Peace-discuss] Durbin's cowardice

[Chas. 'Mark' Bee]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu>
To: <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2005 12:49 PM
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Durbin's cowardice


> [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>

  When the torture scandal comes out, it's "a few bad apples."  When Durbin refers to the few bad apples, all of a 
sudden it's "our military".  lol