Durbin Links Gitmo to Auschwitz, Cambodia and the Gulag Archipelago

I don't have too much time or patience today to get really deep into this. Below is a brief statement made by Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, who took the Senate floor yesterday to link our prison in Cuba to the events of Hitler's Europe, Pol Pot's Cambodia and Stalin's gulags. All I can say for now is that this sort of Dean-esque rhetoric does nothing but undermine the DNC platform in the eyes of most of Americans whom are paying attention. Pol Pot killed 2 million of his own people. Hitler killed 6 million Jews as well as score of other Gypsies and handicapped folks. Stalin killed 20-40 million Russians. Now admittedly I haven't paid that close attention to the brouhaha in Gitmo but I don't think even a million prisoners have died there. To claim that there is parity is ludicrous and it shames the DNC when people like Durbin make such claims. Here's the quote from Durbin:

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here [at Guantanamo Bay]--I almost hesitate to put them in the [Congressional] Record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

"On a couple of occasions, I 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 urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 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. . . . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

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.
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I realize this is a small point to make but all of the events he's describing as similar to the treatment of prisoners at Gitmo pre-dates the creation of rap music by about 30 - 40 years. On a personal note, politicians should just stop invoking the work "rap" in their speeches as it just makes them look rediculous.