Dick Durbin

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) defecating from the mouth on the Senate floor.

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred
here [at Guantanamo Bay]--I almost hesitate to put them in the [Congressional] 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.

A detainee was chained, messed himself, heard rap, pulled his hair, got hot, got cold. But to Little Dick, this is equivalent to the atrocities of the Nazi holocaust, the atrocities of the Soviet gulags, and the atrocities of the killing fields of Cambodia. The horrors of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot are diminished and cheapened by Durbin's comparison.

A Muslim's method of interrogation might well be to cut off the detainee's hand; Saddam's method might be to rape the detainee's wife and kill his children; an Iraqi insurgent's method might be to videotape a detainee's beheading, or hang dead detainees from bridges.

Instead of detaining unlawful, enemy combatants, Dick Durbin would rather trash US troops for the sake of a political ploy.

Reaction from White House spokesman Trent Duffy: "What this is is a disservice to any man and woman serving in the U.S. military who's putting their life on the line each day"

--
Gitmo Cookbook