c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Despite laboring in the shocked-and-appalled trade as an opinion writer, I stopped being shocked and appalled years ago. I embraced the wisdom of the late Peter Lisagor, Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Daily News, who said hyperbole is to Washington what craps is to Las Vegas.

Last Thursday (June 16), however, Sen. Dick Durbin rekindled my sense of outrage. He likened what Americans have done to some Guantanamo detainees to “the Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime _ Pol Pot or others _ that had no concern for human beings.”

Now, the Illinois Democrat had every right to object to the actions an FBI agent set out in a memo. What the agent described _ detainees chained to the floor “in a fetal position” for 18 to 24 hours, left to urinate or defecate on themselves in freezing or overheated cells _ isn’t pretty. Durbin had every right to believe the detainees deserve better. But to even mention the Soviet gulag, Nazi death camps and Pol Pot’s killing fields in the same sentence or speech as Guantanamo is shocking.

To drop the H-bomb (the Holocaust reference) here is appalling. All the more so when a senator, not some Amnesty International official, does so. At once, it trivializes these 20th century horrors and slanders the United States and its soldiers.

Yes, it’s good that a teary Durbin saw fit this week (June 21) to more fully apologize. He wasn’t simply apologizing for his words being misunderstood or blaming critics and “the right-wing message machine” for taking them out of context, which is what he had done earlier. This time he said he was sorry for “his poor choice of words” if they caused pain to Holocaust victims or U.S. soldiers.

But why didn’t he just apologize for dragging the gulag, Nazi death camps and Cambodian killing fields into any discussion of Gitmo? Never mind the harm his statement did to the United States abroad. His death camp riff is a ludicrous, if not ghastly, historical parallel.

Begin with the fact that the man-made hells of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot were packed with millions of innocents; Gitmo houses under a thousand terrorists picked up on foreign battlefields. Isn’t there a slight difference?

People found themselves in Hitler’s camps because they were Jews or members of some other disposable group. The Soviet gulag was filled with free-thinkers and other enemies of the people. Pol Pot’s prey were members of certain ethnic groups, “intellectuals” or people who wore eyeglasses, knew a foreign language or expressed love for a spouse. Guantanamo detainees were _ and many continue to be _ bent on slaughtering Americans. Isn’t, maybe, there a slight difference?

Again, the treatment that prompted Durbin’s history lesson is rough, but it must surely count for something that U.S. interrogators were trying to secure information to prevent the killing of yet more Americans from people who were nabbed while trying to kill Americans. Their “concern for human beings” involves trying to stop the next terror attack and save the lives of U.S. citizens in an ongoing war.

In fact, our military seems to have gone out of its way to show concern for the detainees as human beings. They are, for example, provided Islamic meals. Their average weight gain is 18 pounds. Pol Pot’s slave laborers lived on 180 grams of rice every two days and often died of malnutrition or disease. Gulag food rations were tied to work quotas. Undernourishment led to unfilled quotas, which led to cut rations, which led to unfilled quotas, which led to … . According to Anne Applebaum, historian of the gulag, the starving worker “employs his last remaining strength to creep off into an out-of-the-way corner. Only the fearful cold finds him out and mercifully gives him his sole desire: peace, sleep, death.”

Six million Jews perished in Nazi death camps because of their religion. Pol Pot’s henchmen rounded up Chan Muslims. The U.S. military provides detainees with Korans and even paints the direction to Mecca in their cell _ for the calls to prayer that are broadcast.

Upward of 6 million perished in Nazi death camps, 2.7 million in the gulag and 1.7 million in Pol Pot’s inferno. No detainee has died or suffered serious injury at the hands of their Gitmo tenders. Not one.

It’s almost indecent to mention these differences. Then again, it was downright indecent for a senator discussing Guantanamo to bring up death camps in the first place.

(David Reinhard is an associate editor of The Oregonian of Portland, Ore. He can be contacted at davidreinhard(at)news.oregonian

KRE/JL/RB END REINHARD