Dickie,
When you make a speech that includes strong language to make a point or to get someone's attention, you have to be ready to stand by your words. Recanting due to partisan pressure simply weakens your point. You're right in that, the behavior of Americans in Guantanamo Bay is, by the text of the FBI report, reprehensible, deplorable and undermines our international credibility. Simple logic should have told you, that when you need to communicate details like;
"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."
and your follow-up comparisons not only dwarf the details but completely eclipse them as you and your rhetoric become the story, you've failed in your duties. Then, to get back up in front of the same governing body a week later and blubber like a puss-assed wimp because you couldn't stand the heat... you completely erradicate the important point you were so ineffectively trying to drive home. Remember, in this day and age, Democrats don't get to be stupid assholes one day, lie about it on the Today Show the next and have it all blow over by the weekend (that only works for Fristians). Every word counts and if you're not using them judiciously, please relinquish the job to someone who can handle it.
signed,
A voter with balls.
Posted by kerry at June 23, 2005 07:51 AM | TrackBackWhat he said.
OTOH, the media need to be whacked upside the head for spinning the story this way. Yeah yeah yeah, support the troops, they have a tough job to do, whatever. How tough is it to just not torture people?!
When Amnesty International accuses the nation that claims to lead the free world of running prison camps comparable in brutality to the Soviet gulags...when reports of torture are so severe that comparisons to the atrocities of the Nazis and Pol Pot become conceivable by rational people instead of just wingnuts, and when all the President does in response is accuse the protesters of "hating America," then we're in extremely perilous moral ground.
And if you ask me, our atrocities are worse than those of these other brutal regimes. Why? Because they're ours.
ABSO-FUCKIN'-LUTELY! Thanks Kerry.
Posted by: lulu at June 23, 2005 11:08 AM