WASHINGTON, June 16: The minority whip in the US Senate has compared the US military’s treatment of a suspected Al Qaeda terrorist at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp with the regimes of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Pol Pot.
In a speech on the Senate floor late Wednesday, Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, castigated the American military’s actions by reading an e-mail from an FBI agent.
The agent complained to higher-ups that one Al Qaeda suspect was chained to the floor, kept in an extremely cold air-conditioned cell and forced to hear loud rap music.
The Justice Department is investigating.
After reading the e-mail, Mr Durbin said, “If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.”
Mr Durbin also likened the treatment of terror suspects at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision to authorise the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.
“It took us almost 40 years to acknowledge that we were wrong, to admit that these people should never have been imprisoned. It was a shameful period in American history,” Mr Durbin said.
“I believe the torture techniques that have been used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and other places fall into that same category.”
The White House on Wednesday reacted angrily to Mr Durbin’s remarks.
“It’s reprehensible, as Defense Secretary [Donald H.] Rumsfeld said, to suggest that the Guantanamo Bay facility is anything like a gulag or a mad regime or Pol Pot,” White House spokesman Trent Duffy told reporters.
“It is reprehensible, has no place in the current debate, and as we’ve seen over several years, the detainees in Guantanamo Bay are being treated humanely,” he said.
“What this is is a disservice to any man and woman serving in the US military who’s putting their life on the line each day, because they’re trying to paint all military with a broad brush because of the actions of perhaps a few bad apples, who are being punished severely.”
