A Bar Bet

A guy just called Hugh Hewitt and recounted a bar bet about Durbin's statement. He and a conservative buddy were in a pub and took the quoted report from the FBI Agent to a couple of the staff who didn't know about the story. They told each about the treatment described and asked each whether the treatment described was done by the Nazis, the Commies or USA intelligence agents. Both guys said they thought is was the Commies.

Americans are very pampered people and there are a lot of people running around who don't know anything that's going on in the world. Just watch a segment of Jay Leno's Jaywalking segment. We tend to use words like "torture" without the slightest thought of what it means. But we know from psychological research that people can be easily pressured into inflicting pain on others.

I guess what this shows is that Durbin's equating leaving a guy naked on the floor, denying him access to a toilet, exposing him to cold or heat within the ranges of most HVAC systems, with "torture" might be the kind of things some totalitarians would do. I'm sure that most people would think this was rough treatment, but if you stopped them and gave them some more facts, they would realize pretty quickly how stupid his statement was. But it also shows how naive average Americans are with respect to 1) the kinds of atrocities such regimes were capable of; and 2) what real torture is like. Maybe a better test would have been to cite some real examples of things these regimes have done with the worst things that have been charged against American troops, and ask them to choose which were done by Pol Pot, Hitler, Saddam, Mao, North Vietnam or US MPs and CIA interrogators.