No Apologies

Good to see that Senator Durbin is sticking to his guns:

A Durbin spokesman said Wednesday that the senator did not plan to apologize for the comments. The senator issued a statement saying it's the administration that should apologize "for abandoning the Geneva Conventions and authorizing torture techniques that put our troops at risk and make Americans less secure."

This is in response to rat terrier White House spokesperson Scott McClellan's chiding Durbin for the following statement he made on the floor of the Senate:

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:
"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee 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. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold....On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

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.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, you can get as good an analysis as any over at Whiskey Bar--to provide a quick summary, here are two first-rate points:

America: Still better than Stalin
Quantitatively, the case against moral equivalence may be open and shut, but qualitatively . . . well, it's getting a little more dicey.

And, perhaps the most salient point is: what GOOD has come from the sort of "intensive interrogation" now considered SOP? Can they point to ANYTHING?

Oh, sure, the neo-con/wingnut response would likely be something like "that's classified." Which is, of course, bullshit.

No, I think the pattern here is very clear--at least some people in this country are more than a little comfortable with turning the US into little more than a less-bad version of [name your favorite authoritarian/totalitarian nation here]. For whatever reason, these folks are quite filled with hate, and more than willing to vent said hate on whoever lies in the path--in this case, weird looking foreigners, with the added benefit that, indeed, some (but not all) had, at the very least, criminal intent (if not criminal histories).

However, the fact that such hatred has truly degenerated into a measure of sadism among at least some members of the military is troubling. No, this isn't a blanket criticism of the armed forces (for those who don't know, I was a military kid--dad was a career officer in the US Navy). It IS, however, an observation that those who HAVE decided they don't mind stooping to the level of banana republic (on both the military and civilian oversight side) are doing the entire country a disservice. Do you think the rest of the world will distinguish between "good" and "bad" Americans? How many people of Middle Eastern, North African, Western, or, for that matter, even Eastern Asian descent were considered kooks by Westerners, say, in the late 70's/early 80's, thanks to regular doses of Iranian nationalism/Islamic fundamentalism on our television screens at the time?

You reap what you sow--sometimes tenfold. THAT'S why folks like Durbin are shocked and outraged by horrific behavior on the part of American officials. We're not supposed to be merely "better than Stalin," or "better than Saddam." Whether or not it's crap, the United States really does have a world image--one that, each day, Team Bush is further sullying.