So, do tell, what's been going on while I was away, part one

As you know, back on June 14, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL)

read from an FBI agent's account of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay being shackled to the floor without food or water in extreme temperatures for up to 24 hours at a stretch.

Prisoners in those conditions sometimes urinated or defecated on themselves, the agent reported.

"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.

The Shrub gang called that "reprehensible" (and who better to know) and various troglodytes blasted him as having "libeled the troops." (Of course, it would actually be slander rather than libel, which shows how much they understand their own arguments, but what do little things like accuracy matter when you're on a roll of feigned righteous indignation?)

After a week of attacks with no support (and some criticism) from fellow Dummycrats, Durbin caved.

"In the end, I don't want anything in my public career to detract from my love for this country, my respect for those who serve it, and this great Senate," Durbin said in an emotional statement on the Senate floor.

"I offer my apologies to those that were offended by my words." ...

"I'm also sorry if anything I said, in any way, cast a negative light on our fine men and women in the military."

In fact, that was his second apology; he'd already done so in a statement but apparently that wasn't enough for the vultures and vampires.

The thing that got me most about the whole business is that the screaming GOPpers didn't claim that what Durbin said was untrue - they denounced him for saying it: "How dare you say our blessed troops, the flower of our youth, the summation of all our nobility, are doing such things!"

But, of course, our soldiers, with approval from on high, are doing such things, as even the White House has reluctantly admitted.

AFP, June 24 - Washington has for the first time acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said.

The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In fact, it now emerges in a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine, drawing on a previously unreported policy statement of the US Southern Command dated August 6, 2002, that the medical records of prisoners at Guantanamo are open to examination by interrogators and that

[m]edical personnel belonging to the U.S. military's Southern Command have also been told to volunteer to interrogators information they believe may be valuable,

the Toronto Star (Canada) reported on Thursday. Making that even more explicit,

"[a]n internal, May 24, 2005, memo from the Army Medical Command, offering guidance to caregivers responsible for detainees, refers to the 'interpretation of relevant excerpts from medical records' for the purpose of 'assistance with the interrogation process.'"

The NEJM report, the Star points out, is the second such: Last August, The Lancet reported that doctors at Abu Ghraib had likewise offered medical assistance to interrogations.

But the point here is that as far as the attacks on Durbin were concerned, all that was irrelevant. What soldiers did or didn't do wasn't the focus or even the subject for the condemnation chorus. The accusation, when you come down to it, was not "libel" or even disloyalty, it was heresy, the crime of saying things that are simply not allowed to be said, the truth be damned.

In fact, Richard Daley, the Democrat mayor of Chicago whose voice gets muffled whenever he sits down, came closer to actually accusing Durbin of being untruthful than any right-winger I came across. They avoided issues of accuracy to focus on accusations of apostasy.

And as Durbin performed the heretic's traditional ritual of repentance, the tearful admission of error amid assertions that "Yes, I really do believe," I thought again, as I have so many times recently: We are on our own.

Link to the NEJM report via Crooks and Liars.

Footnote: The Star also reported that

[o]n Tuesday, the Bush administration rejected a proposal to create an independent commission to investigate abuses of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. White House spokesperson Scott McClellan said the Pentagon has already launched 10 major investigations into allegations of abuse and the system was working well.

Yes, but working well at what?