Edited for new stuff:
WASHINGTON — After a barrage of criticism, Sen. Dick Durbin went to the Senate floor Thursday evening to repeat a controversial statement he made two days earlier and insist he said nothing objectionable. In remarks first expressed on the Senate floor late Tuesday and then re-read verbatim on Thursday evening, Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, read the report of an FBI agent who described treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Among the descriptions, the report noted one case in which a detainee was held in such cold temperatures that he shivered, another in which a prisoner was held in heat passing 100 degrees, one in which prisoners were left in isolation so long they fouled themselves and one where a prisoner was chained to the floor and forced to listen to loud rap music.
Following those remarks, the Illinois senator clarified that he was not comparing U.S. soldiers to Pol Pot, Nazis or Soviet guards, but was "attributing this form of interrogation to repressive regimes such as those that I note. "If this indeed occurred, it does not represent American values. It does not represent what our country stands for, it is not the sort of conduct we would ever condone ... and that is the point I was making. Now, sadly, we have a situation here where some in the right-wing media have said that I have been insulting men and women in uniform. Nothing could be further from truth," Durbin said, following up under questioning by Sen. John Warner, R-Va., that he does not know if the interrogators cited in the FBI report were Americans or not.
Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he had inquired as to whether the FBI's descriptions are true. "I was trained as a lawyer, many years as a prosecutor dealt with the bureau, have the highest respect. But I do not accept at face value everything they put down on paper until I make certain it can be corroborated and substantiated. "And for you to come to the floor with just that fragment of a report and then unleash the words 'the Nazis,' unleash the word 'gulag,' unleash 'Pol Pot,' I don't know how many remember that chapter, it seems to me that was a grievous error in judgment and leaves open to the press of the world to take those three extraordinary chapters in world history and try to intertwine it with what has taken place, allegedly, at Guantanamo," Warner said.
The military operates under strict guidelines that are widely distributed. Only mild non-injurious physical contact is allowed, such as light pushing. Sleep deprivation is used along with stress positions, but they are limited in time. One knowledgeable official familiar with the memo cited by Durbin as well as other memos said the FBI agent made no such allegation and that the memo described only someone chained to the floor. Anything beyond that is simply an interpretation, the official said. | "Fake, but accurate", Senator? Where did you get those memos, Lucy Ramirez pass them to you at the Chicago Stock Show? |
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