US Soldiers No Different from Nazis?

The Sundries Shack blogged From James Taranto, here’s an excerpt from the Congressional Record given my Senator Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Democrat. Be very sure of what you read here. Dick Durbin, a US Senator, just compared our soldiers at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis, Communist butchers, and the man who killed millions in Cambodia. Watch carefully who defends his statements and who criticizes then (and the qualifiers they use when they do). Watch them and remember what they’re defending. Do you know any soldiers? This Senator - one of your elected officials - just compared them to three of the most amoral and muderous regimes that have ever existed. Remember that next time Senator Durbin, or any member of his party, tells us how they support the troops or cry when someone questions their patriotism. I’ll tell you this right now - and you can quote me on it tomorrow or in a hundred years. If any American compares our soldiers to those who committed mass slaughter, they are unpatriotic. Period. Dick Durbin ought to be ashamed to call himself an American right now. No American who had any desire to see this country strong and great would have made this accusation.

The Anchoress blogged I always feel like I am not paying enough attention to Jimmie Bise’s Sundries Shack. He’s got a really good blog, full of news and thoughtful commentary. Yesterday’s piece on Dick Durbin’s offensive stupidity is exceptionarlly fine, but may I recommend that you start at the top and move downward? Everything he puts up there is worth reading. Much of it is provocative. Some of it is funny! Speaking of Durbin, Ed Morrissey is scathing in his disdain. And justifiably so. Durbin is a disgrace.

Ed Morrissey blogged If Durbin intended on embarrassing the Bush administration into changing its detention policy, all he wound up accomplishing was embarrassing the voters in Illinois who sent him to the Senate for that ill-educated harangue. The total number of prisoners who have died at Gitmo through neglect or murder comes to zero. Prisoners at Gitmo get there through capture on the battlefield or through intelligence work and go through an identification process to determine their involvement in terrorism against the US and the West. The purpose of Gitmo is to determine what they know about the structure of our enemy -- not a gang of street hoodlums, but a well-armed, well-financed terrorist structure that receives support from nations as well as private financiers. Their intent before capture was to kill us in our homes and businesses, preferably by the thousands if not greater. The same people who sent them succeeded in doing so on 9/11.

They are not criminals, and they do not have a right to access the American court system. Their status under the Geneva Convention is that of an unlawful combatant -- which technically means that the US could have them shot after a military tribunal. Instead, we have chosen to keep them alive and house them humanely while interrogating them thoroughly in order to save American lives. If that means they get cold, or hot, or have little accidents on the floor, then so be it. That isn't torture or even abuse.

And Durbin, who should know better, has the nerve to compare American soldiers to Nazis and Gitmo to the extermination camps they ran. If Durbin can't recall that the Nazis exterminated millions of people, deliberately, in those camps, I'm certain that Holocaust survivors in Illinois and elsewhere can remind him of that fact. If the Senator doesn't know about the estimated 2 million people who died in the gulag system, a system that was used primarily on internal political dissidents to suppress opposition to Stalin, then he should read his Solzhenitsyn. If he thinks that American soldiers operate on the same basis as Cambodia and the killing fields, he's out of his mind.

Finally, the analogy to the Japanese internment camps simply boggles the mind. The Japanese survivors of Manzanar and other camps must be shaking their heads this morning. On what basis does Durbin think that Islamofascist terrorists equate to American citizens detained on the basis of their ethnicity? That statement is so far off the mark as to call Durbin's mental health into question. Gitmo is not a camp of Muslims rounded up out of their American homes and detained for no reason other than their religion; the Gitmo detainees have plotted to kill Americans. They are the enemy. Durbin obviously has lost the capacity to understand that basic concept, a dangerous failing in a time of war.

Millions of people died in the Nazi Death Camps, the Russian Gulags, and under Pol Pot. No one died at Gitmo. And unless they don't like Honey Glazed Chicken and Rice Pilaf, the internees at Gitmo are living better than they did at home.