Shine On You Crazy Diamond
First, read this passage:

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.

Now envision yourself as a college student back in the late 1980s and you read this passage in connection with one of a number of regimes where torturous actions routinely took place, from the Soviet Union to South Africa. Imagine how incensed and angry you'd become. I imagine that I'd join right up with the nearest campus activist group to start protesting this.

But this is not from the late 1980s. This is from now, a report by an FBI agent on what he saw while in Gitmo (Guantanamo Bay), our prison for illegal combatants.

This is what Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) read last week as part of a statement on the Senate floor regarding allegations of torture in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib , and this is what he followed that reading with:

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 statement has been used by the politicians and bloggers on the Right to smear Durbin, suggesting that he stood on the Senate floor and compared our troops to Nazis. He did not. He was making an analogy, one that was perhaps over the top, which he acquiesced to in a later statement:

“More than 1700 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq and our country’s standing in the world community has been badly damaged by the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. My statement in the Senate was critical of the policies of this Administration which add to the risk our soldiers “I will continue to speak out when I disagree with this “I have learned from my statement that historical parallels 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.”

But if you were read this portion of the FBI report in some sort of double-blind test, your mind might indeed wander to atrocities conducted by previous dictatorial regimes. Durbin isn't pointing fingers at the troops--he's trying to protect them. When the enemies of the United States discover these facts about the treatment of prisoners (many of whom certainly deserve to be taken off the "battlefield" in the "War Against Terror"), it helps them to create rage in communities across the globe who are tilting toward extremism and anti-US sentiments in the first place.

The Right, which loves to think that it is rigidly morally upright, has now become excessively relativistic on the subject of torture. Chris Wallace of FoxPropaganda (while on the Hugh Hewitt radio show) provided some of the best quotes (bolding is mine):

CW: Well, he gets out of it in terms of the fact that there's an allegation of mistreatment. But what the FBI memo alleges, and it is an allegation, is, you know, would be considered a day at the beach in the Soviet gulag or Nazi...I mean, what was so horrific in the memo, and I'm not saying, you know, there aren't legitimate questions there, is that someone is chained to a floor and forced to defecate on themselves, and has loud rock music playing. Excuse me? I mean, you know, Auschwitz? Bergen Belsen? The Soviet gulag? I think they would have been very happy to be allowed to defecate on themselves.

The point of this whole escapade should be that since the United States is held up by many as a shining "city on the hill," we need to work harder to become that shining example. From what I've seen from BushCo and their flaunting of international laws and treaties, I'd say we're fairly tarnished and we need some work to get things to shine once again. I think Senator Durbin would agree with that sentiment.