The Redhunter

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:

"One 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 another 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."

It was at this point that Senator Durbin compared what our interrogators did to worst of the twentieth century:

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.

Tough stuff, to be sure, what we do to them. Reasonable people may even argue as to whether the techniques we employ are appropriate.

But to compare what we do to the Nazis or communists did is beyond inappropriate, it is madness and insanity. No, it is more than that.

Why Durbin and the others go off the deep end is because of one of three things, or maybe a combination of them.

Rush Limbaugh today said that Durbin was just desperate to be heard. No one has been listening to these liberals, so the rachet up the rhetoric. This is possible.

More likely he just doesn't care enough about the War on Terror to think through what he is saying. I've heard just about all of the usual suspects recently tell us that we need to close Gitmo. None of them, however, offer any alternatives. Joe Biden casually suggests letting some of the prisoners go. But it's clear from his comments that he hasn't thought the issue through either, and he's supposed to be such a great intellectual. So many of these people just don't stop and think, "ok, so how would I get the information we need? How would I win the WOT?" etc.

Do they even Care?

There is still another explanation, and that is that they just do not care whether we win or not. I've said this before and I'll say it again; there is a certain type of liberal to whom the WOT is a giant distraction from the important work of putting us all under the rule of the EPA.

This is why I think some of them, like John Kerry, so favor turning the WOT into a police action, and why they opposed the invasion of Iraq. Without Iraq, they could keep the issue on the back burners, out of the daily news coverage.

Now they're mad because they realize that the average American trusts the GOP a lot more than then when it comes to national security matters. So rather than contribute to the debate, they seek refuge in what they're comfortable with; "civil rights" type arguments. They've been trying to turn the WOT into a civil rights argument, when it should be about national security. No one (in the US, anyway) has been listening to them, and now some, like Senator Durbin, has gone off the deep end.

We will watch with a combination of sadness and amazement as it continues.

And then we'll get back to the business of winning this war.

Update

Check out the chart that Dr. Sanity put together which compares"...what the media is Obsessed by (on the LEFT) , compared to what they appear Indifferent to (on the Right)"