Sen Durbin Is a Genius!

Floor Statement by Senator Richard J. Durbin on
Guantanamo Bay June 14, 2005

Here are a few of his brilliant observations:

We were attacked on September 11, 2001. We were clearly at war.

Wow! You don't say! What a genius!

There is a lot of confusion about that so let me repeat it. The Geneva Conventions do not give POW status to terrorists.

Then moving further along:

They claim a person detained in the war on terrorism has no legal rights -- no right to a lawyer, no right to see the evidence against them, no right to challenge their detention. In fact, the Government has claimed detainees have no right to challenge their detention, even if they claim they were being tortured or executed.

This violates the Geneva Conventions, which protect everyone captured during wartime. The official commentary on the convention states: "Nobody in enemy hands can fall outside the law."

Huh? I'm confused. Didn't you just say that Terrorists are not protected by the Geneva Conventions? So if they are not protected, then how does their treatment violate the Geneva Conventions?

Then there are the more famous inflammatory remarks:

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.

Oh no! That sounds downright uncomfortable, perhaps even inconvenient!

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.

.This really hacked me off at first. I was so angry that I was having violent fantasies. I thought, "Get the he** out of my country, you maggot!" I have since settled down, but cannot yet find a humorous way to deal with these preposterous claims. Now, I just think, "O.K. DICK. Whatever."

For a pictorial comparison to Nazis, Soviet gulags, and Pol Pot, look here

Update: I found my sense of humor!