[Peace-discuss] Durbin's cowardice

[Alfred Kagan]

It seems to me that this message frames the issue in the wrong way.  
Durbin has been the most out in front on this of all the Democrats in 
the Senate.  Perhaps this is a new role for him.  He seems to have been 
naive about what the response would be.  He was hit on the head and he 
hurts. Instead of rebuking him for his apology, we ought to be 
encouraging him to keep speaking up.  If the anti-war movement dosen't 
do that, he is sure to remain silent.


On Jun 23, 2005, at 12:49 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> [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>
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Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801

tel. 217-333-6519
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