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> GULAG V. GITMO
> Equivalency Test
> by David Bosco
This article of yours was written in response to Senator Durbin's comment, which was: when one considers the documented treatment dealt out to prisoners in the U.S. camps - here's one example - one might think it had taken place in the GULAG. That's all he said; go read it.
Senator Durbin did not say "Guantanamo equals Lubianka," nor did say that the entire U.S. extra-judicial prison system is precisely the equivalent of the GULAG, nor that the U.S. camps hold as many prisoners as the GULAG did. If you want to criticize Sen. Durbin you should address what he said, not what propagandists falsely claim he said. It's an insult to our intelligence for this Bosco character and all the other complainers to try to obscure the issue by erecting and flogging this straw man.
What Senator Durbin _did_ say is that the sadistic abuse, documented by no less than the U.S. FBI itself, heaped upon one certain individual prisoner at Guantanamo is the sort of abuse that was customarily practiced against prisoners in the GULAG. Michael, do you deny, not Mr. Bosco's straw-man's claim, but Senator Durbin's specific assertion of that equivalence? In addition to the FBI testimony concerning a Guantanamo prisoner chained hands-to-feet in his freezing cell until he was forced to defecate in his clothes, please, once again, contemplate this photograph:
http://www.uncharted.org/frownland/pix/iraqis_tortured_abc-b.jpg
To restate Senator Durbin's point, the man in that photograph - I believe he was later identified as a taxicab driver - was beaten to death by jailers in a manner equivalent to that practiced in Lubianka Prison. True or false?
From the tortured prisoner's point of view, it is small comfort to know that Bush's torturers will almost certainly kill a smaller number of captives than Beria's torturers. "You Honor, gentlemen of the jury, it's true that my client killed three people while holding up the liquor store; but after all, three dead are _nothing_ compared to the body-count at the Battle of Gettysburg; you must acquit!" Should America tolerate the behavior in that FBI transcript or in that photograph, as Mr. Bosco evidently does, until after the staff of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have racked up a body-count as high as that of Buchenwald?
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net
