I cannot recommend more highly reading this entire post by John Cole: Durbin Wrap Up. To provide an incentive, I give you a quote that encapsulates what I have been trying to convey about the prison at Guantanamo:
The fact of the matter is, we just don’t know the whole story. And no matter what the blowhards and the administration apologists (and I used to be one) say, it isn’t liberal ACLU pro-terrorist anti-military crazinesss to demand the facts and to demand that we behave better than we have in the past. It isn’t anti-soldier to question policy and to demand that abuses and torture aren’t being conducted under our flag, even if we benignly label them ‘approved interrogation techniques.’
And one more thing- Dick Durbin didn’t do anything wrong- he used some stupid rhetoric. He could have used a better example, and it was stupid to include regimes as murderous as the Khmer Rouge and the Nazis in that speech, even though he didn’t compare our troops to those guys. But that doesn’t give us any excuse to ignore his message.
And just because I have to say it given the idiotic political climate we currently have to live in- I think the severe allegations and the deaths are an aberration, not the norm. I don’t think all of our soldiers are evil and sadistic torturers. I don’t know what is true and what is not, and I don’t know what is considered acceptable under international norms. I, in fact, love the military and think it is the best way that we as a society spend our money. But I don’t think it is stupid or slanderous or unpatriotic to have the idea that everything isn’t kosher.
I wish I had the time to comment both on what Cole has written and to elaborate on my earlier writings at my own weblog, Random Fate, on this topic.
This is important, and Cole provides some much-needed perspective from someone who leans to the right on the political spectrum.