Free Republic

SENATOR DURBIN WINS JANE FONDA AWARD (East Stalingrad, Illinois) -- Senator Dick Durbin (CPUSA-Illinois) has just won the coveted Jane Fonda Award for Conspicuous Aiding and Abetting the Enemy During Wartime. The Jane Fonda Award is the highest honor bestowed by the prestigious Gus Hall Institute for the Prevention of Democracy at the University of Southwestern Illinois. "Senator Durkin was the hands-down favorite this year," said Professor Leon T. Higginbottom, director of the Gus Hall Institute. "The way Senator Durkin accused American soldiers of being worse than Nazis made me think of the good old days during the Vietnam War...

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Friday he regretted any misunderstandings caused by his comments earlier this week comparing American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis. The White House, Senate Republicans and others had called for an apology after Durbin's comments Tuesday. Durbin made the comparison after reading an FBI agent's report describing detainees at the Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as being chained to the floor without food or water in extreme temperatures. ''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...

(6-16) Mr. DURBIN. What I have said is, if you were asked, without being told where this might have occurred, as I said here directly in the RECORD, you might conclude that it was done by one of those repressive regimes because that was the kind of heavy-handed tactic they used, the kind of inhumane treatment in which they engaged. You would be surprised to learn that according to the FBI, it was something that occurred at Guantanamo in a facility under the control of the United States of America. WRONG!!Anyone see the word "MIGHT" in his original quote? (6-14)...

The Senate's No. 2 Democrat has compared the U.S. military's treatment of a suspected al Qaeda terrorist at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay with the regimes of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Pol Pot, three of history's most heinous dictators, whose regimes killed millions. In a speech on the Senate floor late Tuesday, Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, castigated the American military's actions by reading an e-mail from an FBI agent. The agent complained to higher-ups that one al Qaeda suspect was chained to the floor, kept in an extremely cold air-conditioned cell and forced to hear...

CHICAGO - Sen. Dick Durbin refused to apologize Wednesday for comments he made on the Senate floor comparing the actions of American soldiers at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis, Soviet gulags and a "mad regime" like Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot's in Cambodia. Durbin's comments created a buzz on the Internet Wednesday, fueled by sound bites of his speech on radio talk shows. By Wednesday afternoon, Illinois Republican Party Chairman Andy McKenna asked Durbin to apologize. "Senator Durbin's comments come as a great disservice to our military personnel in Guantanamo," McKenna said in a statement. "They are also a great disservice...