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Thursday, June 16, 2005
Consequences, Part 3
Sen. Dick Durbin decried the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. He read an FBI account of the treatment of some prisoners and noted:The hysteria and historical illiteracy, not to mention irrational moral equivalency, continued on the floor of the Senate yesterday as Dick Durbin equated American military personnel at Gitmo to Nazis, Stalinist thugs, and the genocidal Pol Pot....
And Durbin, who should know better, has the nerve to compare American soldiers to Nazis and Gitmo to the extermination camps they ran. If Durbin can't recall that the Nazis exterminated millions of people, deliberately, in those camps, I'm certain that Holocaust survivors in Illinois and elsewhere can remind him of that fact. If the Senator doesn't know about the estimated 2 million people who died in the gulag system, a system that was used primarily on internal political dissidents to suppress opposition to Stalin, then he should read his Solzhenitsyn. If he thinks that American soldiers operate on the same basis as Cambodia and the killing fields, he's out of his mind.
Currently, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., is staging an exhibit that offers food for thought on this issue. The exhibit is called "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race." It examines the idea of "lebensunwertes Leben" -- lives not worthy of life --which the Nazis used to justify their elimination of thousands deemed unfit to live: the retarded, the defective and the seriously ill.
Some German intellectuals championed this idea well before the Nazi era began. A 1920 book, for example, decried "the meticulous care shown to existences which are not just absolutely worthless" -- the disabled and deformed -- "but even of negative value." It called for applying the "healing remedy" of premature death, in order to "eliminat[e] those who were born unfit for life or who later became so."
Update: Jambo here. I hope Hammer doesn't mind my updating one of his posts. The comments and original post reminded me of a great piece by billmon yesterday. The excerpt is long but worth it and it is also worth following the link to read the whole thing.
Conservatives, of course, froth at the use of such terms, which is why the propaganda machine immediately zeroed in on Durbin's reference to an extreme nationalist party that flourished in a certain central European country in the 1930s and early 1940s. Just as they popped a vein over Amnesty International's use of a Russian word for forced labor camp.
Strictly on the facts of the case, they are correct: The American archipelago is just a series of flyspecks compared to its Soviet predecessor. At its peak, the Soviet gulags held an estimated 2.5 million prisoners. The number of deaths -- by torture, execution, disease or deliberate starvation -- has to be counted in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. The KGB, meanwhile, set a record for the assembly-line murder of political prisoners that I don't think has been matched since, not even by that wannabe Saddam.
As for the central European extremist leader, well, we all know what he did.
I guess that's enough to satisify most conservatives. (Maybe they should print up some bumper stickers: "America: Still better than Stalin.") But some of us have slightly higher expectations of a modern parliamentary democracy. Quantitatively, the case against moral equivalence may be open and shut, but qualitatively . . . well, it's getting a little more dicey. Compare, for example, the FBI's account of interrogation methods at Guantanamo -- the one cited above by Durbin -- with this scene from the Solzhenitsyn:
In this "kennel" there was neither ventilation nor a window, and the prisoners' body heat and breathing raised the temperature to 40 or 45 degrees Centigrade (104 to 113 degrees Farhenheit) -- and everyone sat there in undershorts . . . They sat like that for weeks at a time, and were given neither fresh air nor water -- except for gruel and tea in the mornings. Or this passage from Peter Maass's visit to an Iraqi-run, American-advised interrogation center in Samarra:
"One of Falah’s captains began beating the detainee. Instead of a quick hit or slap, we now saw and heard a sustained series of blows. We heard the sound of the captain’s fists and boots on the detainee’s body, and we heard the detainee’s pained grunts as he received his punishment without resistance. It was a dockyard mugging. Bennett turned his back to face away from the violence, joining his soldiers in staring uncomfortably at the ground in silence." With this anecdote from The Gulag Archipelago:
"In the silence we could hear someone in the corridor protesting. They took him from the cell and into a box . . . They left the door of the box open, and they kept beating him a long time. In the suspended silence every blow on his soft and choking mouth could be heard clearly. And these are just the things we know about. What happens on the remoter flyspecks in the American archipelago (much less the affiliated islands of our Saudi or Egyptian or Pakistani "allies") remains largely a closed book. We know prisoners have died in American custody, some appear to have been brutalized before they died. We don't know how many of them were murdered. We don't know how many were subjected to outright torture, not just conditions "tantamount" to torture. We're asked by the Pentagon and the CIA to accept it on faith -- blind faith -- that crimes will be investigated and the guilty punished. But we already know that faith has been terribly abused."
On the other hand, we do know that. We have at least partial knowledge of life and death in the archipelago. There are still journalists willing to do stories and news organizations willing to run them -- Guantanamo even made the cover of this week's Time. Politicians gutsy enough to defy the right-wing slime machine can still get up in the Senate and protest. The security services won't drag them (or us) away.
Exaggerating for political effect is a technique at least as old as Jonathan Swift. (And it's not always for effect: When G. Gordon Liddy compared the BATF to the Gestapo, you knew he really meant it.) Still, quantitatively and qualitatively, we're not even in the same universe as Stalin's paranoid empire.
But if Durban had wanted to be completely honest, he would have skipped the rhetorical flourish about the Soviets, the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, and instead pointed out that if we didn't know better, we might think today's horror stories out of Guantanamo and Abu Graib and Baghram were tales told about prisons in El Salvador, Honduras and Argentina thirty years ago -- or South Vietnam, forty years ago.
14 Comments:
As always...great Coleman coverage. I added on a bit to your comments about Durbin over at cp.
cp
By 
, at
3:10 PM
Durbin is off his nut and comments like this are going further paint the democratic party as a bunch of wackos. It isn't as if Howard Dean isn't towing the line in that area.
Now does Gitmo need to be closed? Maybe, but it is not because anyone is being tortured there. It is because right or wrong the islamofacists are using it a rallying point to recruit more terrorists. Closing Gitmo doesn't mean we that we should send the unlawful combatants home. They will need to be moved somewhere else and split up among holding areas in the United States until they have all been through trials to determine which ones are no longer threats. I do not believe for one second that they are being tortured as that term is used by most sensible people; and I don't believe that most of the American people believe that either. Lets cut the idiotic rhetoric and think of ways to approach this problem.
By , at
9:50 PM
As Jon Stewart noted last night, and as I posted May 28, and in accordance with Godwin's Law, I disagree with Durbin's Nazi analogy. When Michelle Malkin advocates rounding up and detaining Muslims in America, that's fascistic. Detaining people without charge for years and subjecting them to intense interrogation methods and abuse (clearly these have occured, even if you disagree with the term 'torture') is wrong. America is a better nation than that.
Isn't the whole point of keeping the detainees in Cuba to prevent them from having access to courts? The Bush administration has fought (and lost) battles to prevent the detainees from having any due process rights.
In the end, it sounds like you and Durbin are in 90% agreement on this issue. You disagree with his Nazi analogy and object to the term 'torture'. You think the detainees should have a right to some trial or hearing to determine guilt or innocence and that those who are not threats should be released.
Believe it or not, that's what liberals have been pushing for since Guantanamo opened. Sorry to break the news, but you're agreeing with the liberal position on this one.
Thanks for the comment.
Oh my!! I'm a liberal? Better go out and wipe my ass with the American Flag and sing folk songs. Seriously though...
Detainees at Gitmo are getting trials. Military trials before Military Tribunals. I do not believe that detainees are entitled to the due process rights of American citizens because they are unlawful combatants. Back in the 1940's and 50's if we had caught unlawful combatants coming into our country planning terrorist attacks, we would have just lined them up against the wall and shot them, like we did to the German saboteurs of that era.
I don't lose sleep over the fact that some of these detainees are chained to the floor and subjected to temperature extremes or if they are made to squat for long periods of time until they crack. If they have information that will result in the saving of American lives then frankly I don't care what happens to them.
Do you think any Islamofacist group is going to be holding any public hearings over the brutality of beheading innocent foreign workers and journalists; over the needless slaughter of innocent women and children? They don't ring their hands over such matters, they just want us dead. Well then, lets not ring our hands either. Lets do what it takes to protect our country and its citizens.
By , at
4:07 PM
"They don't ring their hands over such matters, they just want us dead. Well then, lets not ring our hands either."
But at what point then does America cease to be a "special" nation? If we are to adopt the methods of our enemies what makes us different from them? When America is no longer morally superior to the likes of the Taliban or 70s era Argentina to defend America becomes just run of the mill nationalism and we have killed off whatever it was that made our nation the "best hope of mankind." Conservatives who are willing to destroy what is best about us to gain a little (dubious) safety are no patriots.
The German agents were given the benefit of a trial: "A subsequent military trial of the 8 captured agents resulted in 6 death sentences, one life imprisonment and one 30-year sentence. On the recommendation of the Justice Department, President Truman granted executive clemency on condition of deportation to the two surviving agents who were deported to the American Zone of Germany in 1948]."
At least according to the liberals at the Department of the Navy.
Points well taken. I also fear that America may lose what makes us special in terms of our freedoms and our ideals. But if the choice is the safety of my family vs. the erosion of some of my freedoms, the choice is easy. I probably wouldn't have said that 10 years ago, but things change when you have children and a family.
I admire the military and the effort of its soldiers. They are a very professional group and do not get much credit from the mainstream media. Most liberals at best thumb their nose at the military. Ed Kennedy treated the anniversary Abu Ghraib like it was a Goddamned holiday. Abu Ghraib does not define our military.
But at worst, liberals put our soldiers in danger of being killed with idiotic comments. It seems the liberal mantra is to spout the word "nazi" at every perceived abuse of power by this administration. That is truly dangerous.
Consider that the most popular e-mailed news story on the Al Jazeera website is the comments of Mr. Durbin. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what the comments are being used for. They have put us and our military in more danger. There is no excuse.
By , at
10:21 PM
I'm not sure why Durbin's comments would outrage and inflame the Muslim world. He's criticizing and condmening the abuse of Muslim detainees. I don't see that Durbin's commentary would be at all inflammatory to those who oppose Guantanamo.
On the other hand, the FBI report describing the treatment of detainees in Gauntanamo could be inflammatory. I don't blame Durbin for that -- I blame the administration for condoning such treatment.
Sean, first of all, tho we don't see eye to eye on this issue let me thank you for a rational and invective free debate on the subject. I appreciate it and I suspect Hammer does too.
That said, I think you are off base with your criticism--what has damaged our reputation and made the world more dangerous for our troops and private citizens alike is not the reporting of misdeeds but the misdeeds themselves. Even if the so called liberal press never said a word the abuses still took place. THAT, not name calling by Senators, Democrat or otherwise, is the problem. But the problem goes beyond the horrible abuses that have taken place. It is also about the fundamental dishonesty and lawlessness of the Bush administration on this and so many other issues. Don't forget, regardless of what has taken place at Gitmo the ONLY reason prisoners are being held there is to put them beyond the reach of American or international law. That should stun anyone wants to live under a just system. When all that it takes to lock someone away indefinitely is a label from the president of the US we are in very scary territory. What would prevent the president from declaring some vocal critic of his administration an unlawful combatant and locking them up with nary a call to their family let alone their lawyer? What if he decides one morning that the leaker of the Downing Street memo has given aid and comfort to the enemy? Tell me honestly, what is left of the American system that brings that person home once he is sent to Gitmo?
"Wrestle not with monsters lest you become one."
But what makes all of this even more galling is that it hasn't really done anything to make us safer. I too have a family, including two young children, who I want to be safe. What's more my wife works for American Airlines so we have an added bit of apprehension in the house (One of the things I will always recall about 9-11 was the number of friends and family who called that morning to make sure she had not been on one of those flights.) But W has managed to make us even less safe with his outrageous misadventure in Iraq. We have spent $400 billion there but we can't come up with the money to help former Soviet republics secure their nuclear materials. The military is desperate for Arab language speakers yet shortly after 9-11 we drummed out a dozen students in the Army foreign language school because they were, gasp, gay. During WWII we launched a new destroyer approximately every 38 hours yet today we can't manage to provide proper armor for a few thousand humvees. We have managed to squander every bit of good will we have earned in the world in the last 75 years. Someone has placed us all in greater danger all right, but it wasn't Dick Durbin.
Just wanted to agree with Jambo on one point. It takes at least a bit of courage to sign your name to a comment knowing that most of the people who read it will disagree. Sean and I practiced law together for awhile and, given the public defender cases we both had, are probably more used than most to having our best arguments be waved away.
I know at least 3 very conservative people who I learn things from. None of the write for the Weekly Standard, but one of them is Sean.
Thanks Jim. I look forward to more debate.
One good thing happened to me today. Convinced the Judge in that attempted murder case I was telling you about to dismiss the attempted murder count on insufficiency of the evidence. He did enter judgment on the first degree reckless endangerment, but I have an excellent appellate argument for that one. Justice has prevailed, partially. Beware of rural juries. They can really fuck things up.
By , at
10:02 PM
Congrats, Sean! I bet a jury verdict would've been even sweeter, but getting an attempted murder conviction overturned has got to be one of the biggest wins of your career so far.
Here's the real puzzler -- would your attempted murderer have gotten more or less time than Gleason?
We'll see. With the entry on the reckless endangerment he only has 12 and 1/2 years exposure. So he won't get the 25 that maniac Kirchmann gave your guy.
I hope you know the date that dude gets out. I'd had to see you live a real life "Cape Fear".
By , at
10:34 PM
He got 20 years back in 1999. His earliest parole would be 2004. His MR is sometime in 2013.
I'm sure Todd Bjerke is higher on the list than me.
