Scott Johnson, echoing his PowerLine co-bloggers, faults Senator Durbin’s recent remarks comparing some of the U.S.’s interrogation methods with the methods of the Soviets and Nazis. According to Johnson, Durbin’s remarks were nothing more than "rabid foaming at the mouth," deployed "in lieu of reasoned criticism."
Johnson is wrong. Durbin’s remarks cannot be dismissed with a wave and a few proverbs from the Big Book of Stunning Overreach and Bizarre Metaphors (e.g., Durbin is "al-Qaeda’s most popular senator," better fit to "reconstitute the Democratic Party as a branch of the Peoples Temple than to hold high office" or "lead a doomsday cult devoted to drinking poison Kool-Aid"). Nor are they comparable to the moral idiocy recently on display at Amnesty International. Indeed, it’s telling that Johnson does not quote Durbin’s actual remarks in the course of his criticism; yet, they bear reading, for placed against Johnson’s screed, they show the lie in Johnson’s thinking. Here is what Durbin said (HT: TalkLeft; emphasis mine):
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.
Durbin’s complete remarks are here (pdf).
If there is rabid foaming in the above, it is by the FBI agent who wrote the report that Durbin quotes on the Senate floor. If there is a dearth of reasoning in the above, it’s because Johnson believes that chaining someone hand and foot in a fetal position, denying them food and water, and letting them piss and shit on themselves over the course of 18-24 hours doesn’t evoke the tactics of the Nazis and Soviets. If Johnson believes this whole thing to be a lie, or a put-on, or if Johnson thinks the tactics described to be legitimate, then let him stand up and say so.
There’s a difference — and it’s not a small one — between calling U.S. soldiers Nazis or stating that Gitmo is the "gulag of our times" and pointing out that some of the interrogation tactics used at Gitmo could be confused with interrogation methods used by the Nazis or in the Soviet Union. The former is dishonest and smacks of a partisan myopia; the latter, sad to say, is simply telling it like it is.
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