One of the unfortunate ironies of the furor over Guantanamo Bay (as noted here) is that, while over 100 prisoners have died in U.S. custody, approximately 27 under suspicious or questionable circumstances, there do not appear to have been any deaths at Guantanamo Bay. A fact confirmed by Dick Durbin himself:
Q: I guess one of the reasons people are having such a hard time with this one, is when comparisons are made and you use names like Nazis and Soviet gulags, when you are talking Nazis there were what, 9 million people killed in the camps there. The gulags had about 3 million and so forth. And I know Gitmo is not the Holiday Inn down there, but I don’t think anyone has died down there, have they?
Durbin: No, that’s true. In all fairness, they did not. But I don’t believe we were dealing with deaths at Abu Ghraib either. We were dealing with a situation where when people saw the digital camera photographs, they said “My God! Americans should not be involved in that kind of conduct.”
10,000 Angels will swear you were wrong
I’ve watched the video of Sen. Durbin’s apology and I think it was more than slimy. He apologised to “some” who thought his remarks were in poor taste. He invoked the words of Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, to indicate that, if his words turned out t…
Exactly right. Remember, this is a prison camp housing terrorists that have been identified as enemy combatants. They have no legal standing in any reputable court in the world. Also to be noted, in most cases their home countries have refused to take them back or our courts have ruled that we can’t send them back because they would be (rightly so) executed.