Friday, June 17, 2005

An International Embarrassment

Apparently the Democrats have decided that the best way to discredit the current administration is to talk as if they, the Dems, are all raving lunatics. Indeed, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont illustrates the point while at the same time aptly describing the Left-wing of the contemporary Democratic party when he said of Guantanamo Bay that it's "an international embarrassment to our nation, to our ideals, and it remains a festering threat to our security."

Another fine example of the madness which seems to have seized the Democrats is Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat. Durbin essentially equated Guantanamo Bay with the Nazi death camps in which about 9 million people lost their lives, Stalin's prisons in which 2.7 million persons died, and Pol Pot's reign of terror in which 1.7 million Cambodians were systematically murdered.

Mr. Durbin also likened the treatment of terror suspects at the prison in Guantanamo, and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to authorize the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II:

"It took us almost 40 years for us to acknowledge that we were wrong, to admit that these people should never have been imprisoned. It was a shameful period in American history," Mr. Durbin said. "I believe the torture techniques that have been used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and other places fall into that same category."

Perhaps one of his aides will help the Senator to understand the difference between interning innocent American citizens simply because of their ethnicity, and interning terrorists captured while trying to murder innocent American citizens. The distinction is not a difficult one to grasp, and we're confident that Sen. Durbin, if it's explained to him slowly, will get the gist of it.

What was the treatment that elicited the Senator's fatuities? An FBI agent reported to higher-ups that he witnessed one al Qaeda suspect at Gitmo who was chained to the floor, kept in an extremely cold air-conditioned cell and forced to hear loud rap music. The Justice Department is investigating the complaint sort of like the Soviets and the Nazis did when allegations of abuse in their death camps came to light.

There were no details given about the prisoner in question. Why was this one terrorist deprived of the considerable amenities enjoyed by his co-detainees? The Senator apparently isn't interested in telling us. Perhaps context would spoil the effect he was trying to create which is to extrapolate from a single case of possible mistreatment to the conclusion that Gitmo is another Dachau and American troops are as bad as the German SS.

Meanwhile, the Senator is blithely indifferent to the fact that, whereas the death camps to which he has compared Gitmo killed millions and subjected millions more to years of starvation, pain, and inexpressible misery, not a single one of the five hundred or so Gitmo detainees have died and only a handful have made credible claims of poor treatment. The most significant allegations of abuse, in fact, have been five charges of irreverence toward the Koran.

Somebody should explain all this to Senator Durbin before he makes an even bigger fool of himself with his next round of pronouncements.