Don’t ask–never should have left Colorado. I think my body was protecting me from the first Red Air Quality Day here in St. Louis by making my stomach revolt against food for 36 hours.
Today, it’s 98 degrees of soupy air that I would swim in, but there’s no where to get a breath.
On that note, the must read is Zorn’s column
“I’m surprised. Though Mayor Daley can’t even pronounce Guantanamo–he says it `Gwa-ta-mahn-o.’ And even though he blithely presided over the Cook County state’s attorney’s office during the biggest police-torture scandal in Chicago’s history. And even though he mistily invoked `what America’s all about’ at the news conference in which he announced a `presumed guilty’ program of posting photos on the Internet of people arrested but not yet convicted in prostitution stings.
Coming at this as someone who thinks the analogy was unproductive and wrong, but not in the hyper whining of screaming the TROOPS, this was the greatest irony to me–Daley, who was Cook County State’s Attorney during the Burge torture ring’s days of operations and had plenty of warnings about it, never did a thing and to this day is strangely silent about it. While Dick Devine might be called on it as well, Devine has a very delicate situation since he worked for the law firm defending Burge and has recused himself from the case. But Devine didn’t say that Durbin was out of line and essentially lay a line of defense for the White House from probing such claims with seriousness. Daley not only attacked Durbin for something Durbin didn’t say, he essentially said such questions about the treatment of prisoners was beyond the pale.
What makes that so disturbing is that Daley didn’t stop at criticizing Durbin–obviously I did that though mildly. What he did was say that we should never say that US Soldiers might do something horrific. While it is reasonable to say that our military is one of the better disciplined and humane militaries to probably ever fight, we know individuals within the military also have done horrible things.
Worse, Durbin didn’t implicate troops–he implicated the administration. Many have tried to spin that as being about troops, but while it might involve US active military personnel, it might just as well be private contractors, CIA, or military intelligence that isn’t a typical GI. We know from Abu Ghraib that much of the prison operations were outside of the control of the typical chain of command and shadowy people showed up for interrogations with the typical command structure both overstretched and out of the loop on key decisions.
We also know that we’ve outsourced torture through extraordinary rendition that takes individuals from our custody to the custody of nations that will torture individuals without any rules to worry about. My second criticism of Durbin is that by choosing a bad analogy he sidetracked the conversation.