Durbin Does Disaster Recovery

Not good enough Durbin. Someone in your position needs to think before they speak. Resign and crawl into the hole where you belong.

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - Trying to quell an ongoing furor, Sen. Dick Durbin partially apologized Friday for remarks he made on the Senate floor this week comparing American treatment of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention center to the tactics of murderous regimes.

"I have learned from my statement that historical parallels can be misused and misunderstood," Durbin, D-Ill., said in a written release. "I sincerely regret if what I said caused anyone to misunderstand my true feelings: Our soldiers around the world and their families at home deserve our respect, admiration and total support."

Durbin has been on the receiving end of an onslaught of criticism from the White House, from Republican colleagues in the Senate, from conservative media stars such as Rush Limbaugh and from voters.

That criticism was sparked by a lengthy floor speech Durbin delivered late Tuesday in which he took the administration to task for its mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Durbin read aloud from an FBI agent's detailed e-mail complaining about the "torture techniques" visited upon one al-Qaida prisoner.

That e-mail described how the agent entered interview rooms to find "a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold."

Durbin read the contents of the FBI agent's report and then denounced the treatment of prisoners.

"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," Durbin said.

Those words caused the White House press secretary to call the senator's remarks "reprehensible." Limbaugh said Durbin should resign in disgrace and urged people to call his office.

Initially, Durbin refused to back down even as the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said Durbin had demonstrated "a grievous error in judgment."

"This administration should apologize to the American people for abandoning the Geneva Conventions and authorizing torture techniques that put our troops at risk and make Americans less secure," Durbin said Thursday.

But by late Friday afternoon, Durbin's office put out a new statement with a tone of some contrition.

"We had so many questions and so many Republican senators and now the commentators had said this was a Durbin attack on the troops, and he wanted to clarify that that was not the case," said his spokesman, Joe Shoemaker.

Still, Durbin took pains to point out he still has a problem with the way the administration has handled its prisoners of war.

"More than 1,700 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and our country's standing in the world community has been badly damaged by the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo," Durbin said, referring to abuses at a prison in Iraq as well as the facility in Cuba. "My statement in the Senate was critical of the policies of this administration which add to the risk our soldiers face."

And, said Durbin, "I will continue to speak out when I disagree with this administration."

Tracey Schmitt, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, described Durbin's expression of regret as "a positive step."

Still, she said, "It's troubling that the knee-jerk reaction of Democrats in Washington is to lash out with vile rhetoric without any consideration of the consequences. The American people deserve more from their leaders."

From the Macon Telegraph.