Dick Durbin

Wow. In case you've missed it, and you probably have because most of the MSM (mainstream media) have ignored it, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the number 2 Dem in the Senate, right under Harry Reid, has created a firestorm, and may soon come under pressure to resign.

You're not hearing about it yet, but the blogs are ablaze on this one, and this may be another story that doesn't go away because the blogs won't let it.

On Tuesday, Durbin stepped to the floor of the US Senate and read an email from an FBI agent who is part of an ongoing investigation into the actions of interrogators at Guantanomo Bay, Cuba, where the U.S. Army has detained over 500 enemy combatants in the war on terror.

Durbin said the following:

If I read this to you, and didn't 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 happened by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime, Pol Pot or others, that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that's not the case. This was the action of Americans in treatment of their own prisoners.

The Washington Times wrote about this yesterday, and then wrote today about reaction from the Senate, which is intriguing. Specifically, Hillary Clinton declined to make any comment, and the Times quoted Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, as saying the email is unsubstantiated.

Radioblogger posts here a transcript of Durbin's attempt to wriggle out of what he said.

And Radioblogger also has a must read transcript of a radio interview that Hugh Hewitt did with two law professors, one of whom represents at least one detainee in Gitmo. Reading this will help you get past all the spin and rhetoric and help you get a start on the substance of this debate.

At the end, Radioblogger wraps up the transcript with a few of his own thought-provoking comments:

m my recollection, the Jews in Nazi Germany were not at war with Hitler or the German government when the concentration camps started. The people killed in the Soviet gulags were not suicide-bombing insurgents. Pol Pot's palaces of the skulls were not built with the skeletal remains of armed militias within his country. In northern Iraq, I don't believe that the Kurds were even throwing rocks at Saddam Hussein's military when they got gassed with chemical weapons.

These were all instances of genocide, where the leaders of each country mass murdered their own citizenry, sometimes in graphically cruel ways.

At Gitmo, with one or two exceptions of an American citizen renouncing their citizenship and going on the battlefield to fight against us, every detainee there is a foreign national, who was an armed enemy combatant, that was caught in the process of either shooting against our troops, or plotting to kill Americans here. So before you even get to what the proper definition of the treatment being applied at Guantanamo, the comparison of Durbin is sickingly inappropriate, and is rather disqualifying for a United States Senator, especially one in a position of party leadership that Durbin enjoys.

Now, regarding the treatment, being that these combatants were not caught in the United States, but rather on the battlefield, and being that they are not United States citizens, they do not enjoy the Constitutional rights that our citizens enjoy. There is international law to follow, and from what I've been able to discern, our conduct at Guantanamo, by and large, has stayed well within those limits. If a detainee is brought in, that is believed to be high up in the Al Qaeda heirarchy, that may have information as to how to locate Osama and shorten the duration of the war, I just don't have a problem with a broken toe here, or a few nights of 30 minutes of sleep, followed by three hours of Barry Manilow records at 130 decibles, complete with strobe lights.