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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2005-06-18

The Rocky Wades In

The silence of the MSM on the Dick Durbin rant has been palpable. So I was happy to see the Rocky Mountain News try to deal with the issue in the Saturday edition.

Or so I thought.

The editorial leads off simply enough. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin says interrogation techniques at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay prison remind him of the Nazis, Soviets and Khmer Rouge.

Amnesty International dubs Guantanamo the "gulag of our time."

And it draws the appropriate conclusion shortly thereafter. Are the critics' assessments of Guantanamo correct?

The short answer is no. But the more complicated answer is that while such critics exaggerate - sometimes obscenely and slanderously so -

Which is all well and good. It spends a bit of time dissecting some of the specific charges about Gitmo--effectively and sometimes forcefully.

But then it goes soft on the whole deal right at the end.

Just because some critics are fools, however, hardly means all criticism is foolish. . . while those techniques never descend into torture, they involve routine humiliation and serious psychological and physical stress that clearly violate the standards for treatment of prisoners-of-war laid down in the Geneva accords.

The Bush administration correctly points out that many enemy combatants don't qualify as prisoners-of-war under the official definitions, but it had also said it would adhere to the Geneva standards even for enemy combatants. It's hard to reconcile that pledge with the interrogation techniques used on at least some prisoners at Guantanamo.

The other matter the administration has not satisfactorily addressed is how long it intends to hold the detainees. . .

We simply don't believe that's acceptable for a nation that prides itself on honoring the rule of law.

This position from the Rocky surprised me and disappointed me. I suppose its easy to slip back into a September 10th mindset--at least for the 48%, it is.

It's also very disappointing that this is the only editorial mention of Dick Durbin's slander in either of the Denver papers this week.
Posted by: Michael / 6/18/2005 01:53:00 AM

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