Sound ridiculous, you say. Mark, I know what you are doing. You are drawing comparisons to Dick Durbin's commentary on Gitmo. Yep, that's right. Well, the faithful reader says--on Fear Factor the "contestants" have a choice, they don't have to participate. They have the free will not to engage in those actions.
And you would be right. However, let's still think a bit. These terrorist animals, some of whom danced and burned flags celebrating 9/11, had a choice as well. They used their FREE WILL, to make a choice. They chose to take up arms, not for a country, but rather for a megalomaniac named Osama bin Laden. They made the choice to fight against a nation that wanted nothing more than to protect itself from further attack, and also to spread liberty in the process.
The contestants on Fear Factor are not complaining; they made their choice. So did the animals on Gitmo.
But, getting away from using hyperbolic examples, let's discuss Mr. Durbin's comments in some matter of detail. He compared to Nazis and the Gulags and Pol Pot incidents were people had their air conditioning turned up til they were cold, and incidents where the air was turned off and it got hot. He also told about rap music being played which drove some to pull their hair out. Well, let's get some first hand information from people who were at these places Mr. Durbin, and see if your charges of torture hold up against the examples you gave, shall we?
Nazi Death Camps
First, no one has died at Gitmo. Estimates say 6-8 million Jews, Christians, homosexuals, and dissenters died in Nazi death camps. At Gitmo, prisoners are given their holy book and allowed to pray five times a day. In the death camps, you could not practice your religion except at night in the dark. If you were a public worshipper, you were shot. But, I digress. Let's read a first hand account, shall we:
Outside the gate music starts to play. Yes, we have an orchestra, made up of sixty men, all inmates. This orchestra, which has some known personalities in the music world in it, always plays when we are going to and from work or when the Germans take a group out to be shot. We know that for many, if not all, of us the music will someday play the "Death Tango," as we call it on such occasions.
(The Janowska Road, Leon W. Wells)
Wow, people had to play happy music so the Germans could celebrate, and the Jews had to play while their brothers and sisters were slaughtered. That's not happening at Gitmo, Mr. Senator.
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget the smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
(Night, Elie Wiesel)
The Nazis slaughtered children in their camps, Mr. Senator!!! Where is your sense of decorum, sir? You talk of air conditioning and compare it with the wholesale slaughter of chidlren simply because they were Jews? Shame on you sir. the Nazis pulled golden teeth out to make pretty teacups from Jews. The Nazis raped women in front of their fathers and husbads, then killed the whole family when finished. The Nazis, Mr. Durbin, did not allow the Jews to pray before killing them. The Nazis, did not feed them rice pilaf or food fit for their religion. In fact, the Nazis made the Jews eat food that was forbidden. Yet, you try to claim that our forces are Nazis? Your Nazi argument is disgusting, and you should resign simply for overstating the level of "abuse" (granted, Christina music is horrible, but come on) at Gitmo.
Here are some pictures to refresh your memory Mr. Durbin and libs. Makes Abu Gharib and whatever made up Newsweek rubbish seem tame, by comparison. Ask the survivors if they would rather be treated as they were or have the ac turned up or down, and I think you will be surprised by their answer. But wait, they are Jews, and according to the latest Dim talking point, the Jews are really to blame for 9/11, so you probably won't believe them anyway. However, here are some pics for you to look at.
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Well, you were wrong with the Nazis. Maybe I can help you by talking about the Soviet gulags, and getting those testimonials.
The Soviet Gulag
First, the gulags were a form of political terrorism. These massive prisons were used to weed out those that were even remotely suspected of having all but the most enthusiastic of feelings toward the Soviet system. Solzhenitsyn, for instance, found himself in a Siberian gulag for making the mistake of making a joke about Stalin in a letter.
Can a single prison holding less than 500 people be considered a widespread tool of political terrorism?
Second, the gulags were a source of slave labor. It is not a coincidence that the massive increase in the number of prisoners in the gulags is timed precisely with the announcement of Stalin's first Five Year Plan. Although most of our knowledge of the gulag system comes from the intellectual class that survived them, such as the memories of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelego, most of the victims were simple peasants. The gulags were not prisons in the Western sense of the word. The gulags were massive industrial complexes of forced labor.
No prisoner at Guantanomo or at any other detention facility for war prisoners has alleged forced labor.
Third, while the purpose of the gulags was not necessarily to torture or kill prisoners, the gulags were a place where humiliation, torture, and genocide scale mass deaths occured. Unlike survivors of the holocaust, though, who have found voice in the state of Israel, in US based interest-groups, or who have captured the fascination of Hollywood, the story of the gulags remains largely unheard of for the vast majority of the American public. While we understand that the gulags were bad places in the Soviet Union, the horrors of the gulag do not seem to resonate with us in the same way.
Very few cases of death are alleged to have occured in any US war related detention facility, none at Guantanamo.
From the Hoover Institute, to illustrate the atrocity of the Gulag and the ridiculousness of comparison by Durbin and Amnesty International:
-Ten percent of the entire population of the Soviet Union lived in the camps.
-The Gulag administration was the largest single employer in all of Europe.
-The average life expectancy of a camp prisoner was one winter.
-At least twenty million people perished in the labor camps during Stalin’s rule.
-The camps dehumanized life and instituted a reign of terror throughout Soviet society.
Susanna Pechuro retells the horrors of the gulags:
The most horrible thing I saw in a camp was how children were taken away from their mothers. Because it's something you can't live with. And there are some things I don't let myself remember, because if I do I get insomnia for several weeks remembering those screaming mothers after their children have been taken away from them, [screaming] because they will never know where these children are being taken, to what orphanages. I've never seen anything more horrible than that, even though I also saw people beaten up. But nothing more horrible than the separation of children and mothers. And this can never and should never be forgiven. No matter what communists say now, the social structure which made it possible will never be pardoned.
Melana Zyla Vickers relates the following story from Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History. It is reminiscent of the Holocaust:
...millions of children were either imprisoned with their mothers, or were born in the Gulag. Babies were taken from their mothers to be watched in batches of dozens by rough-mannered nurses. The nurses "took off their nightclothes and washed them in ice-cold water. The babies didn't even dare cry. They made little sniffing noises like old men and let out low hoots. This awful hooting noise would come from the cots for days at a time," wrote political dissident Hava Volovich. Of her own baby, Volovich wrote: "Little Eleanora, who was now fifteen months old, soon realized that her pleas for 'home' were in vain. She stopped reaching out for me when I visited her; she would turn away in silence. On the last day of her life, when I picked her up (they allowed me to breast-feed her) she stared wide-eyed somewhere off into the distance, then started to beat her weak little fists on my face. . . . Then she pointed down at her bed. In the evening, when I came back with my bundle of firewood, . . . I found her lying naked in the morgue among the corpses of the adults
These stories taken from Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History.
Gee, Senator Durbin--Let's see--No forced labor, none of this terror like what has been described above. Yet you refuse to apologize for your remarks. Tell me, are you this blind or are you stupid, or are you just this filled with hate toward Bush that you would malign our fighting forces thusly? Are you this hateful? I thought Dems were the loving bunch....But wait, let's look at your third comparison....that of Pol Pot. And Dims should know about Pol Pot, after all, it is because of them that the Killing Fields were allowed to go on....
Pol Pot
On April 17th, 1975 the Khmer Rouge, a communist guerrilla group led by Pol Pot, took power in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. They forced all city dwellers into the countryside and to labor camps. During their rule, it is estimated that 2 million Cambodians died by starvation, torture or execution. 2 million Cambodians represented approximately 30% of the Cambodian population during that time.
The Khmer Rouge turned Cambodia to year zero. They banned all institutions, including stores, banks, hospitals, schools, religion, and the family. Everyone was forced to work 12 - 14 hours a day, every day. Children were separated from their parents to work in mobile groups or as soldiers. People were fed one watery bowl of soup with a few grains of rice thrown in. Babies, children, adults and the elderly were killed everywhere. The Khmer Rouge killed people if they didn’t like them, if didn’t work hard enough, if they were educated, if they came from different ethnic groups, or if they showed sympathy when their family members were taken away to be killed. All were killed without reason. Everyone had to pledge total allegiance to Angka, the Khmer Rouge government. It was a campaign based on instilling constant fear and keeping their victims off balance.
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Senator Durbin, we are not torturing people for being educated, or for the way they speak, or for any of that which Pol Pot killed people. We are not seeking to bring people backward, as Pol Pot did with the year zero craziness. We are trying to bring a region of the world forward, and these animals in Gitmo are holding onto fifth century attitudes and dogma. You sir, have no grasp of the situation, because liberals never have. It is always the same for you--if it is not in my immediate backyard, out of sight out of mind. You did the same cry and leave scheme in Vietnam, with the calls for exiting and laying out an exit strategy, and the country fell. You cried when we went in trying to eliminate Pol Pot, and we let him stay, because God forbid we do anything....
Senator Durbin, you have every right to hold the views of America as evil people. Many liberals in our nation, mostly contributors, I am sure, hold the same view. People like Peter K. here hold that view that we Americans are all EVIL (tm) hegemenous monsters out to exploit everything. The problem is your position. You are a US Senator. A Senator whose nation is at war and whose words have extra weight. You should have considered this before spouting off your hateful screed about our soldiers. Of course, you could be as delusional as PK, thinking that Americans ARE Nazis, heck, you might even be crazy enough to think the Holocaust was overrated...I dunno....but your comments have undermined the war effort. You have put the lives of Americans in jeopardy by stirring the pot, so to speak, against our soldiers without understanding what is going on in Gitmo.
I have talked to soldiers who have worked at Gitmo on guard duty. To protect them, I am not going to issue any names. Needless to say, my cell bill may be a bit expensive this month, as some are on the coasts of this GREAT nation. They say that the terrorists defecate on themselves and throw it at guards, and that the guards have a tough time keeping things clean because of this. The inmates there also eat better than our soldiers in the field do, get air conditioning. Yet, Durbin and people like PK equate this to torture. To do so takes away the meaning of torture and the sensitivity to it, and is a slap in the face to survivors of the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, and the gulags. Mostly, it is a slap in the face to those who would defend us from terror. Senator Durbin, I call upon you to resign.
APOLOGY UPDATE
Yesterday evening, Sen. Durbin took to the floor of the Senate and offered a non-apology. Following is the text, along with my comments and dissection of the B.S.
Mr. President, more than most people, a Senator lives by his words. Words are the coin of the realm in our profession. Occasionally, words will fail us, and occasionally, we will fail words.
What in the blue hell does this mean? Durbin is trying to impress us and dodge and weave. The man cannot just get up and say: I am a schmuck, I was stupid, I have no concept of history, no concept of the world today! Nope, let's prattle on....
On June the 14th, I took the floor of the Senate to speak about genuine, heartfelt concerns about the treatment of prisoners and detainees at Guantanamo, and other places. I raised legitimate concerns that others have raised, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, about the policies of this administration, and whether they truly do serve our needs to make America safer and more secure. Whether, in fact, some of the policies might, in fact, endanger our troops, or in some ways, disparage the image of America around the world.
Mr. Senator, the only one whose conduct endangers our troops is yours, and the editors at Newsweek, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the al Jazeera all stars whom they support. Your comments were detrimental to us, and YOUR comments lesssen American image around the world. Your words carry weight, and when you use hyperbole like you used, it is not only stupid--it is dangerous and reprehensible and should not be tolerated.
During the course of that presentation, I read an e-mail from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that was discovered to exist last August, and has now been produced as part of a Freedom of Information Act. After reading the horrible details in that memo, which characterized the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo,
WAIT A MINUTE! Horrible conditions! Horrible conditions! OUR soldiers don't even get air conditioning! OUR soldiers do not get served rice pilaf. Oh, and by the way, why don't you look at the Nick Berg video for terrible details and conditions. Why don't you look at the video/pics of that trucker who was beheaded and desecrated. Where is your outrage over those tortures? Where is it? Hmmm? Wait, I forgot this is the New Democrat Party--Attacking our Defenders, Defending our Attackers. Silly me...but wait, here comes the heartrending emotion.....
I then, on my own, my own words, make some characterizations about that memo. I made reference to the Nazis, to the Soviets, and other repressive regimes. Mr. President, I've come to understand that was a very poor choice of words.
No ***t, Sherlock! You realized that discussing how you really feel and revealing the prevailing attitudes of the Left in Congress does not resonate with the American people. And, Hillary probably body slammed you against the wall for making the party look bad, and putting her in a rough spot. It is hard to believe that this guy still doesn't get it, but of course, he has to keep the 527 money coming in, so he can't go back now....
Last Friday, I tried to make this very clear, that I understood that those analogies, to the Nazis and Soviets and others, were poorly chosen. I issued a release, which I thought made my intentions and my innermost feelings as clear as I possibly could. Let me read to you, Mr. President, what I said in that release last Friday. I have learned from my statement, that historical parralels can be misused and misunderstood. I sincerely regret if what I said caused anyone to misunderstand my true feelings. Our soldiers around the world, and their families at home, deserve our respect, admiration, and total support. Mr. President, it is very clear that even though I thought I had said something that clarified the situation, to many people, it was still unclear.
The translation: you people are too stupid to understand my nuance. While I did allude to the US being a tortuous nation, I didn't really mean we were tortuous. I mean, can't you tell I didn't mean it. I mean, I did wink a bit when I was speaking. You stupid, uncouth flyover people! How dare you hold me accountable to my words!!!! You people are just to stupid to understand my nuance! I apologize for your stupidity, especially since it is my party that has ruined the public schools....
I'm sorry if anything I said caused any offense of pain to those who have such bitter memories of the Holocaust, the greatest moral tragedy of our time. Nothing, nothing should ever be said to demean or dimish that moral tragedy. I'm also sorry if anything I said in any way cast a negative light on our fine men and women in the military.
Translation: I am sorry that I was actually held accountable for my words, that I got caught. You see, I have been in this echo chamber so long that I believed that everyone was part of moveon.org and the George Soros all-star team. I am sorry that people actually listened to me. I am not used to that, as I usually have nothing of any notoriety to say.
I went to Iraq just a few months ago with Senator Harry Reid, on a delegation, bipartisan delegation, the President was part of it. When you looked in the eyes of those soldiers, you see your son. You see your daughter.
If this is how you talk to and about your children, Sen. Durbin, I think we should alert child services. Also, notice how you continue to belittle them. They are children, who aren't as smart as you and Sen. Reid. The condescension never stops. Tell me, Senator Durbin, do you even know what an apology is?
They're the best. I never, ever intended any disrespect for them. Some may believe that my remarks crossed the line. To them, I extend my heartfelt apologies.
KEY POINT:HERE it is! The truth: I don't think I need to apologize, Durbin is saying. However, because the strategists and poll numbers are in, I guess I will pretend to. I don't believe my remarks crossed the line, because WE ARE nazis. I don't believe my remarks crossed the line because it is very hot in Cuba, and people should have air conditioning. I mean, what are these people guilty of? They were just trying to kill American soldiers, you know, the baby killers. Why should we be upset with that? But, to save face, I will apologize.
There's usually a quote from Abraham Lincoln that you can turn to in moments like this. Maybe this is the right one. Lincoln said, if the end brings me out right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten thousand angels swearing I was right wouldn't make any difference.
Mr. Durbin, how about the quote from Lincoln where Lincoln said that Senators were who caused trouble in the war effort should be prosecuted? I like that quote. I think it applies to you. You should resign. Actually, I think you should be censured or impeached.
In the end, I don't want anything in my public career to detract from my love for this country, my respect for those who serve it, and this great Senate. I offer my apologies to those who were offended by my words. I promise you that I will continue to speak out on the issues that I think are important to the people of Illinois, and to the nation. Mr. President, I yield the floor.
Translation: I want to save face and make this go away. I know the Republicans here are chowderheads and that John McCain will back me and his backing means something because he served in Vietnam, and I hope that my constituents will forget about it come reelection, and that the calls will stop to my office. I will continue to go on making an arse out of myself, because I believe the US soldiers are tortuous fascist nazis, but I will learn to write it in a memo and blame a staffer.
And guess what? The Republicans bought it! John McCain practically ran up to the mike and embraced the apology. I am surprised he didn't tongue kiss Durbin. Then, today, Frist says it is time to move on. Oh yeah, was it time to move on after Lott's 1st apology? His second? His fifth?
What Trent Lott said was far less harmful than this by Durbin, and Lott is still being held up as Evil. He apologized so many times, he is still apologizing. It was covered for over a month. Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters, even John McCain jumped in and said he needed to resign his leadership. The Left said, well, if a Democrat said something even remotely resembling these remarks, they would resign. Hmmm....where is Sen. Durbin's resignation from the Dim leadership? Hmm...it must have gotten lost! Sen. Lott had Republicans and Democrats on his case, and he did apologize. He did more than just say that he is sorry for offending people with his poor choice of words. He said his words were wrong. And he resigned.
However, Dick Durbin was not chastised by any other Democrat serving in office except Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago. Harry Reid passed the buck. Hillary was mum, even while she was talking about how Bush refuses to offer criticism of his own staff and party members (can you say hypocrite?). And, disappointingly, there was very little Republican anger over this.
Dick Durbin cannot apologize enough. He said our defenders were Nazis, torturers, and members of the Khmer Rouge. He did it ON THE FLOOR OF THE UNITED STATES SENATE, ON THE OFFICIAL RECORD! Trent Lott made a poorly chosen remark at the party of a senile old man who once was a segregationalist. It was meant as a complement, poorly chosen mind you, but a complement to a dying old man. Lott's comments did not appear on the covers of al Jazeera with rave reviews. He did not become the poster child for the Hate America First movement. He apologized and even went out and gave interviews on BET. He is still apologizing. Durbin says Bush needs to apologize and that he will continue to speak out. Tell me, who is the party of sensitivity to words? Not the Democrats. They can't even live up to their own promises of dealing with slanderous comments!
The Modern Democratic Party--Defending Our Attackers, Attacking our Defenders, and loving every minute of it.
