Richard Cohen: Piling on Dick Durbin

Richard Cohen, in the Washington Post (6-21-05):

Those of us who have read accounts of the gulag or of the interrogation methods of the Nazis and similar barbaric regimes are familiar with the infinite varieties of torture. Maybe for that reason I did not feel it was anything of a stretch for Sen. Dick Durbin to refer to those regimes when reciting what an FBI agent had seen at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba: detainees "chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water," or deprived of a bathroom, or kept in extreme heat or cold. One was found "almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out." Whatever that is, it is not America.

This was Durbin's point. He was right, although not necessarily politically prudent or elegant, when he said that if you did not know these descriptions came from an FBI agent, you "would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime . . . that had no concern for human beings." I certainly might have thought so -- although, in general, these regimes were capable of far worse than that, and Durbin should not have said "most certainly." A "possibly" would have done just fine...

...The practice of the Bush White House and its supporters is to go right at its critics -- to hell with fairness -- and shout them down. This is what the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth did to John Kerry and this is what the White House itself did to Newsweek. That magazine's story about reported abuses of the Koran at Guantanamo was admittedly wrong on one specific, but we did learn later that the military itself had investigated reports of Koran abuse. There's smoke, if not fire, there.

The vitriol being heaped on Durbin would be almost funny if it weren't so mean. The man, after all, is the virtually invisible Dick Durbin. And yet he is being tarred and feathered for saying something that has occurred to many of us: Guantanamo makes the United States look bad.

The contempt the Bush administration has shown for world opinion and international law -- not to mention American traditions of jurisprudence -- is costing us plenty. We are not the Soviet Union and we are not Nazi Germany, and Dick Durbin did not intend to say we are. His detractors have to know that. Their intention, however, is not to answer criticism but to silence a critic. They ought to be -- whatcha say, Newt? -- censured.