[Peace-discuss] Durbin Should Resign?

[Gabriel Stanton]

He might need some more courage but the man had a good
start. Politics makes people do things against there
better judgement. I know it shouldn't. Now If Durbin
refers to th Downing street memos then he's going
somewhere. That was good Mort (especially the quote)
but I like the article by Eric Zorn in the Chicago
Tribune. I think its the best article from him I've
read in a long time( Its kind of smart alecky though)

Peace,

Gabe

Eric Zorn
Durbin should have stood up for his opinion

Published June 23, 2005 (chicago tribune)

Dick Durbin needs a new speechwriter.

First, there was that needless line about the Nazis,
Soviet gulags and Pol Pot in an otherwise tight,
3,000-word address last week to his U.S. Senate
colleagues about treatment of suspected terrorists
held at Guantanamo Bay.

Then there was the wheedling, weepy, invertebrate tone
of his conditional apology--six variations on the
weasel words, "If I have offended anyone,
then..."--Tuesday evening just hours after his fellow
Democrat and longtime supporter Mayor Richard Daley
branded his earlier remarks "a disgrace."

Not that I'm applying for the job or anything, but
here is what Durbin should have said Tuesday:

"It's come to my attention that the mayor of the
largest city in my home state raged at a news
conference earlier today that I said our soldiers `in
Guantanamo Bay are Nazis.'

"I'm surprised. Though Mayor Daley can't even
pronounce Guantanamo--he says it `Gwa-ta-mahn-o.' And
even though he blithely presided over the Cook County
state's attorney's office during the biggest
police-torture scandal in Chicago's history. And even
though he mistily invoked `what America's all about'
at the news conference in which he announced a
`presumed guilty' program of posting photos on the
Internet of people arrested but not yet convicted in
prostitution stings.

"Still, I thought he'd be able to see through the
false logic and deceptive paraphrases offered by my
critics and focus his concern where it belongs: On
what FBI reports say is being done to prisoners at
Gwan-tahn-a-mo in the name of the United States of
America:

"These reports describe detainees `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. ... shaking with cold. ... [or] made
unbearably hot.'

"As I said last week, quoting Colin Powell: The use of
such bestial interrogation techniques will `reverse
over a century of U.S. policy and practice ...
undermine the protections of the law of war for our
own troops ... [and] undermine public support among
critical allies, making military cooperation more
difficult to sustain.'

"It is immoral, ineffective and un-American for us to
torture prisoners. The America I believe in has long
been the world's beacon for human rights and dignity;
for fairness and due process of law. T

"The America I believe in is better than the America
on display in our overseas prisons. The America I
believe in inspires rather than disgusts the
international community.

"If anything I said caused you to believe that I was
equating American soldiers with Nazis or equating
American leaders with Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot, then
you are an idiot.

"I said nothing of the kind.

"I said that our mistreatment of wartime prisoners is
of the sort you'd expect to see in a brutal,
totalitarian dictatorship, not in a nation that has
long congratulated itself on its exceptionally high
standards of liberty and law.

"It's a troubling similarity. It's a warning that
we're slipping.

"But it's not--duh!--even close to an across-the-board
assertion of equivalence.

"Hey, I'm sorry I played `the Hitler card.' It always
inflames, distracts and confuses, and it never
convinces. In this case, it let opportunists ignore my
main point and gasbag instead about my unnecessarily
overwrought metaphor and the many, obvious ways in
which America is not Nazi Germany.

"But if you expect me to come before you and bite my
quivering lips as I apologize to those who were spun
into a dudgeon by the contemptible effort to draw
attention from these infamous allegations, you'll be
disappointed.

"I will not babble out a mewling defense of my
patriotism to those with the vile audacity to have
questioned it.

"A true patriot loves what his country stands for, not
necessarily what his country does, and I will not
shrink from holding America to her ideals.


Eric Zorn Durbin should have stood up for his opinion

Published June 23, 2005

<< previous 
 
"I will not dignify with a response the charge that my
ill-advised hyperbole diminished the undiminishable
horror of the Holocaust, impugned our soldiers or
harmed our reputation.

"Nonsense.

"The problem with our reputation is poorly chosen
policies, not poorly chosen words. And that, Mr. Mayor
and my fellow senators, is the `disgrace' we should be
talking about."



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ericzorn at aol.com 


		
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