Stupid or Anti-American: You make the call

George C. Landrith

Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) is outraged by the treatment of terrorists held at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (known as Gitmo). According to Senator Durbin, terrorists at Gitmo who may have critical information are aggressively questioned about plans for future al Qaeda attacks. He says they are forced to listen to loud music, wear handcuffs and leg irons, and sit in rooms where the air conditioning is turned up and down. Durbin labels this torture and compares American soldiers to Nazis who murdered 12 million. He compares Gitmo to communist Gulags where more than 20 million were killed. When given the chance to apologize for his outrageous and dishonest comparisons, Durbin stubbornly defends the slander.

Is Durbin utterly stupid or does he simply hate America?

High school students everywhere know enough history to see that Durbin is dead wrong. They study the Holocaust and have seen the disturbing pictures of Nazi concentration camps – humans that look like skeletons because of starvation, mass graves, cruel medical experiments, and other unspeakable horrors. Most folks know less about the Gulags, but they were the model for Nazi concentration camps.

Gulags were prison labor camps in the Soviet Union where staggering numbers were starved and tortured and more than 20 million were murdered. The average life expectancy in a Gulag was one winter. Crimes that brought innocent people to the Gulags included: being Jewish, speaking with foreigners, being from a foreign country, being middle-class, being Christian, telling jokes about the government, and refusing the sexual advances of government bureaucrats.

In contrast, each of the 750 detainees at Gitmo was captured while fighting and killing America soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq or is believed to be an Al Qaeda terrorist. During war, captured enemy combatants are detained until the conflict is over. No trial is held and no term is imposed. The detention lasts as long as the hostilities exist.

No detainee at Gitmo has died as a result of mistreatment. When a Gitmo guard punched a detainee who attacked him, the guard was severely punished. The detainees at Gitmo receive first-rate medical care and are well fed – receiving meals that even meet their religious requirements. We spend more money feeding a detainee at Gitmo than we spend feeding an American solider serving in Iraq. The Red Cross inspects Gitmo regularly. More than 1,000 journalists and 120 Members of Congress have inspected Gitmo.

We even provide the terrorists with copies of the Qur'an and provide a place and time for their prayers – which presumably include appeals to kill more Americans. We have no obligation to accommodate their warped beliefs. But we accommodate them nonetheless. Amazingly, some have even charged abuse and torture on grounds that a few U.S. soldiers may have touched copies of the Qur'an without wearing gloves.

Durbin now admits that he does not know whether the anonymous e-mail he read on the Senate floor is true, but he still refuses to apologize and defends his scandalous defamation of America. But even if true, playing loud music, wearing handcuffs or leg irons, or having more or less air conditioning does not constitute torture. Our own soldiers in Iraq often work in temperatures well over 120 degrees. Why does Senator Durbin think terrorists deserve better conditions than our own troops? To label such things as torture only serves to make rational people not care about so-called torture. After all if that is torture, why should we care?

Why doesn’t Durbin show his outrage when terrorists behead and blow up Americans? Why do handcuffs and a lack air conditioning draw Durbin’s ire? Of all the things in the world worthy of outrage, why does Sen. Durbin reserve his warped outrage for America and her soldiers who have a record of defending liberty around the world?

Aljazeera, the terrorist news network, leads its news with Senator Durbin’s remarks. Terrorists are using Durbin’s false statements to justify killing more Americans and blowing up more Iraqis – after all a sitting U.S. Senator says America is as bad as the Nazis and that Gitmo is comparable the Communist Gulags. Senator Durbin, do the words “aid and comfort to the enemy” mean anything to you? How many new terrorists will be recruited because of Senator Durbin’s vitriolic hate speech? How many American soldiers and civilians will die because terrorists believe Durbin’s remarks prove that more Americans must die?

We the people should demand that Durbin step down. There is precedent for this. A few years ago, then Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott made some stupid, but ultimately harmless, comments at the 100-year birthday party of Sen. Strom Thurmond. He apologized dozens of times. But the mainstream media wouldn’t let it die and Lott resigned his leadership post. The media will not hound Senator Durbin from office, but the American public must.

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Mr. Landrith is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was Business Editor of the Virginia Journal of Law and Politics. He had a successful law practice in business and litigation. In 1994 and 1996, Mr. Landrith was a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Virginia's Fifth Congressional District. He served on the Albemarle County School Board. Mr. Landrith is an adjunct professor at the George Mason School of Law. He is recognized as an authority on constitutional law and jurisprudence, federalism, global warming, and property rights.

george@ff.org