It is worth reflecting for a moment about how we have reached this point. Many people who read history remember, as World War II began with the attack on Pearl Harbor, a country in fear after being attacked decided one way to protect America was to gather together Japanese Americans and literally imprison them, put them in internment camps for fear they would be traitors and turn on the United States. We did that. Thousands of lives were changed. Thousands of businesses destroyed. Thousands of people, good American citizens, who happened to be of Japanese ancestry, were treated like common criminals.
It took almost 40 years for us to acknowledge that we were wrong, to admit that these people should never have been imprisoned. It was a shameful period in American history and one that very few, if any, try to defend today.
I believe the torture techniques that have been used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and other places fall into that same category. I am confident, sadly confident, as I stand here, that decades from now people will look back and say: What were they thinking? America, this great, kind leader of a nation, treated people who were detained and imprisoned, interrogated people in the crudest way? I am afraid this is going to be one of the bitter legacies of the invasion of Iraq.
It is not too late. I hope we will learn from history. I hope we will change course. The President could declare the United States will apply the Geneva Conventions to the war on terrorism. He could declare, as he should, that the United States will not, under any circumstances, subject any detainee to torture, or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. The administration could give all detainees a meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention before a neutral decisionmaker.
Such a change of course would dramatically improve our image and it would make us safer. I hope this administration will choose that course. If they do not, Congress must step in.
Two op-ed columns today also focus on the real problem. Middle East expert Jim Zogby argues that what really hurts our image in the Arab world are the administration’s torture and indefinite detention policies, not Durbin and other critics of Guantanamo:
What damages the U.S. image and endangers us is not comments by Mr. Durbin and other critics of Guantanamo Bay. It is the Bush administration's detention and interrogation policies. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld explicitly authorized the use of abusive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay. FBI agents and the Red Cross both concluded that the use of these techniques at Guantanamo constituted "torture." In the past, the United States always has condemned the use of such techniques. Now we apparently approve of them.
According to polls we have conducted, Arab attitudes toward the United States have dropped to dangerously low levels. The treatment of Arab and Muslim prisoners is a big reason, rivaling regional disapproval of U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the war in Iraq.
Comments by Mr. Durbin and other critics help, not hurt, our image in the Middle East. People there are already outraged about Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. That Mr. Durbin and others have demonstrated the courage to speak out and challenge these shameful and abusive practices illustrates to the Arab world that not all Americans support what the world knows we have done.
As their criticism makes clear, there are still Americans who hold high the values we call on others to emulate. At a time when we're trying to spread democracy, Mr. Durbin and other critics show people in the Arab world how a democracy works.
Clarence Page notes in the Chicago Tribune that we still need to address the problems at Guantanamo that Durbin raised. We won't let this discussion die. It's too important. Senator Durbin was correct and apology or no apology, the Dems should stand behind him and not let the right-wing direct and dominate the discussion.
