“Thank you, Dick Durbin. You make us proud.”
– Barak Obama, 2004 Democratic National Convention
It looks like Senator Durbin’s inflammatory comments on the military and the Bush Administration are not surprisingly making the rounds. Aljazeera was sure not to miss out on this goodie from Senator Dick:
A US senator has refused to apologise for comparing the actions of US soldiers at Guantanamo Bay to those of Nazis, while others have decried or defended the mandate and method used to hold prisoners there.
Durbin did not plan to apologise for the comments, spokesman Joe Shoemaker said.
“This administration should apologise to the American people for abandoning the Geneva Conventions and authorising torture techniques that put our troops at risk and make Americans less secure,” Durbin had said in a statement on Wednesday evening.
During a speech on Tuesday, Durbin, the Senate’s number two Democrat, quoted from an FBI agent’s report describing detainees at the naval base in Cuba as being chained to the floor without food or water in extreme temperatures.
“If I read this to you and did not 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 been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime – Pol Pot or others – that had no concern for human beings.”
Durbin is not alone in his criticism.
Human-rights groups have long accused the administration of unjustly detaining suspects at the prison camp. Amnesty International last month called the detention centre the “gulag of our times”.
