Durbin, channelling Cassandra, was right.
I know this is too easy, not to mention a few days out of date. But I'm behind in my blogging, and, anyway, sometimes the obvious just needs to be repeatedly pointed out.
Dick Durbin (06/14/05):
Mr. President, there has been a lot of discussion in recent days about whether to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. This debate misses the point. It is not a question of whether detainees are held at Guantanamo Bay or some other location. The question is how we should treat those who have been detained there. Whether we treat them according to the law or not does not depend on their address. It depends on our policy as a nation.
...If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.
Scott McClellan (official Bush Admin spokesman) 06/15/05:
I think the Senator's remarks are reprehensible. It's a real disservice to our men and women in uniform who adhere to high standards and uphold our values and our laws. To compare the way our military treats detainees with the Soviet gulags, the Nazi concentration camps, and Pol Pot's regime is simply reprehensible. And to suggest that these individuals -- I notice comments were made that -- comparing it to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. To suggest that these enemy combatants who are detained at Guantanamo Bay should be released just is simply beyond belief to me...Our men and women in uniform go out of their way to treat detainees humanely, and they go out of their way to hold the values and the laws that we hold so dear in this country. And when you talk about the gulags and the concentration camps in Pol Pot's regime, millions of people, innocent people, were killed by those regimes.
Hugh Hewitt (unofficial Bush Admin spokesman) 06/20/05:
Durbin stands with the Michael Moore left, the Howard Dean attack-America-first caucus, and the international chorus that assigns the responsibility for the jihadists to American overreach in the world.*
Dana Priest (Washington Post reporter) 11/01/03:
The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.
The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several [former Soviet] democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.
...The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.
...Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA's approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning.
Now, cribbing as usual from TNR, if one insists on taking Durbin's initial comparison between current US and former Soviet prisons literally, then it's true that his numbers were way off and still are. About two million people were held at one time in Stalin's covert torture prisons (though I'm not sure Cheney would even want to define the routine infliction of physical labour beyond what can be considered healthy, and the inadequate provision of warmth and personal space for years on end, as torture). In sharp contrast, only hundreds are being held in the CIA-endorsed covert torture prisons being run by various ex-Communists in Eastern Europe. If you add up all the US war-on-terror plus Iraq War detentions around the world, it's only (I think) in the low thousands. And doubtless a much, much higher percentage of these people actually deserve to be in prison than was the case for those who resisted Soviet collectivism in the 30s.
But of course Durbin wasn't talking literally when he made his comments back in June. He wasn't saying "US forces are just like the Khmer Rouge reconstructed in the Middle East". He was saying "US forces are doing things we might once have associated with regimes like the Khmer Rouge". He was pushing the envelope a bit at the end of a much longer statement about the troubling aspects of US policy toward detainees held abroad. He was asking in effect what it said about a first-world, democracy-exporting country that it couldn't run one puny occupation and one broader global conflict against a network of angry Sunni billionaires and their middle-class disciples without resorting to example after example of the sort of behaviour we've long associated with the other side of the last great (if massivley overhyped) global conflict, against totalitarian communism, against regimes like Pol Pot's. The last time I wrote about this, I suggested modern-day Uzbekistan might have been a somewhat better analogy. But the basic thrust was clear as day.
It was Republicans and their spin machine that went all literal on Durbin. It's the right's favourite trick afterall, to fall back on a mix of sophism, prissiness and willful obliviousness to nuance. The latest example is their bringing back the tired old saw (apparently already picked up by David Brooks behind the TimesSelect wall) that once upon a time the Democrats also thought it would be bad if Saddam got his hands on nuclear and chemical weapons, and lots of Big Dems made statements to that effect back in the day, and so the Democrats are big hypocrites for complaining abot faulty, politically-driven prewar intelligence. The implication of this argument, of course, is that there's only two positions anyone can hold vis-a-vis Saddam's Iraq: Dick Cheney's or George Galloway's. This is ludicrous. As Digby points out, there was at least a third position: Bill Clinton's policy of containment. Actually there were countless points to land on the fertile intellectual terrain between "Saddam's a blight on the world" and "Let's use half the US military to occupy his country".
Really, what's amazing in retrospect isn't that Durbin's Gulag-PolPot analogies weren't absolutely deadly accurate, although we can all keep parsing and parsing. What's amazing is that they weren't completely inaccurate. Which means they weren't totally inappropriate either. And the more time passes, the more accurate, and the more appropriate, they get. Durbin has got Cassandra's curse afterall.
Dick Durbin (06/14/05):
Mr. President, there has been a lot of discussion in recent days about whether to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. This debate misses the point. It is not a question of whether detainees are held at Guantanamo Bay or some other location. The question is how we should treat those who have been detained there. Whether we treat them according to the law or not does not depend on their address. It depends on our policy as a nation.
...If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.
Scott McClellan (official Bush Admin spokesman) 06/15/05:
I think the Senator's remarks are reprehensible. It's a real disservice to our men and women in uniform who adhere to high standards and uphold our values and our laws. To compare the way our military treats detainees with the Soviet gulags, the Nazi concentration camps, and Pol Pot's regime is simply reprehensible. And to suggest that these individuals -- I notice comments were made that -- comparing it to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. To suggest that these enemy combatants who are detained at Guantanamo Bay should be released just is simply beyond belief to me...Our men and women in uniform go out of their way to treat detainees humanely, and they go out of their way to hold the values and the laws that we hold so dear in this country. And when you talk about the gulags and the concentration camps in Pol Pot's regime, millions of people, innocent people, were killed by those regimes.
Hugh Hewitt (unofficial Bush Admin spokesman) 06/20/05:
Durbin stands with the Michael Moore left, the Howard Dean attack-America-first caucus, and the international chorus that assigns the responsibility for the jihadists to American overreach in the world.*
Dana Priest (Washington Post reporter) 11/01/03:
The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.
The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several [former Soviet] democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.
...The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.
...Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA's approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning.
Now, cribbing as usual from TNR, if one insists on taking Durbin's initial comparison between current US and former Soviet prisons literally, then it's true that his numbers were way off and still are. About two million people were held at one time in Stalin's covert torture prisons (though I'm not sure Cheney would even want to define the routine infliction of physical labour beyond what can be considered healthy, and the inadequate provision of warmth and personal space for years on end, as torture). In sharp contrast, only hundreds are being held in the CIA-endorsed covert torture prisons being run by various ex-Communists in Eastern Europe. If you add up all the US war-on-terror plus Iraq War detentions around the world, it's only (I think) in the low thousands. And doubtless a much, much higher percentage of these people actually deserve to be in prison than was the case for those who resisted Soviet collectivism in the 30s.
But of course Durbin wasn't talking literally when he made his comments back in June. He wasn't saying "US forces are just like the Khmer Rouge reconstructed in the Middle East". He was saying "US forces are doing things we might once have associated with regimes like the Khmer Rouge". He was pushing the envelope a bit at the end of a much longer statement about the troubling aspects of US policy toward detainees held abroad. He was asking in effect what it said about a first-world, democracy-exporting country that it couldn't run one puny occupation and one broader global conflict against a network of angry Sunni billionaires and their middle-class disciples without resorting to example after example of the sort of behaviour we've long associated with the other side of the last great (if massivley overhyped) global conflict, against totalitarian communism, against regimes like Pol Pot's. The last time I wrote about this, I suggested modern-day Uzbekistan might have been a somewhat better analogy. But the basic thrust was clear as day.
It was Republicans and their spin machine that went all literal on Durbin. It's the right's favourite trick afterall, to fall back on a mix of sophism, prissiness and willful obliviousness to nuance. The latest example is their bringing back the tired old saw (apparently already picked up by David Brooks behind the TimesSelect wall) that once upon a time the Democrats also thought it would be bad if Saddam got his hands on nuclear and chemical weapons, and lots of Big Dems made statements to that effect back in the day, and so the Democrats are big hypocrites for complaining abot faulty, politically-driven prewar intelligence. The implication of this argument, of course, is that there's only two positions anyone can hold vis-a-vis Saddam's Iraq: Dick Cheney's or George Galloway's. This is ludicrous. As Digby points out, there was at least a third position: Bill Clinton's policy of containment. Actually there were countless points to land on the fertile intellectual terrain between "Saddam's a blight on the world" and "Let's use half the US military to occupy his country".
Really, what's amazing in retrospect isn't that Durbin's Gulag-PolPot analogies weren't absolutely deadly accurate, although we can all keep parsing and parsing. What's amazing is that they weren't completely inaccurate. Which means they weren't totally inappropriate either. And the more time passes, the more accurate, and the more appropriate, they get. Durbin has got Cassandra's curse afterall.
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