Durbin's My Question

[Correction appended.]

The latest conservative bandwagon is driving for an apology from Senator Durbin for his rhetorical excess last week. What did he do? He read a FBI agent's description of a Gitmo prisoner's treatment. Then he said that, if we didn't know better, we'd think we were reading the account of a prisoner in the custody of Nazis or Soviets or the Khmer Rouge.

Hyperbolic? Yes. Traitorous? No. Not by any measure.

If you'd read the description without knowing who was holding the prisoner, what would you think? What swaggering imbeciles like Mark Steyn don't understand (or aren't honest about) is that to assert that some American troops mistreated a prisoner the way troops in a given bloody dictatorship would is not to assert that American troops in general are like troops of that dictatorship. Durbin was driving home a point. He overreached.

But while we're making comparisons, what about the CIA agents who did this?

Al-Jamadi was brought naked below the waist to the prison with a CIA interrogator and translator. A green plastic bag covered his head, and plastic cuffs tightly bound his wrists. Guards dressed al-Jamadi in an orange jumpsuit, slapped on metal handcuffs and escorted him to the shower room, a common CIA interrogation spot. There, the interrogator instructed guards to attach shackles from the prisoner's handcuffs to a barred window. That would let al-Jamadi stand without pain, but if he tried to lower himself, his arms would be stretched above and behind him. The documents do not make clear what happened after guards left. After about a half-hour, the interrogator called for the guards to reposition the prisoner, who was slouching with his arms stretched behind him. The interrogator told guards that al-Jamadi was "playing possum" — faking it — and then watched as guards struggled to get him on his feet. But the guards realized it was useless. "After we found out he was dead, they were nervous," Spc. Dennis E. Stevanus said of the CIA interrogator and translator. "They didn't know what the hell to do."

If you substituted "KGB" for "CIA," would that pass the offended conservatives' paper-bag test? If not, what about this?

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.

Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar's face.

"Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. "Drink!"

At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

No, these incidents didn't happen at Guantanamo, but that's not the point. The point is the legitimacy of comparisons and asking people to use their imagination to understand why the way we're treating (some) prisoners is unacceptable. We don't think Durbin should apologize. We think offended conservatives should answer the question. Further, we think the Administration should apologize for allowing and even encouraging this kind of behavior. But we know that won't happen. Actually, if we follow Bush's logic, we should give Durbin the medal of freedom.

As Biden said, we need an independent commission to investigate the entire American archipelago and recommend what we should do about it. It's long past time we did.

Correction: Previously, this post referred to a question that was not explicitly stated: "If you read the description Durbin read to the Senate, who would you think was treating prisoners that way?" I'd characterized the question as Durbin's, but he didn't phrase it as a question; I did.