Durbin News from All Over

Semi-puff piece on the better Senator from Illinois

If there were a yearbook for Illinois senators, Dick Durbin might mistakenly be labeled as the guy who is "also pictured."

After all, when he first arrived in the U.S. Senate, his fellow Illinois senator was the controversial Carol Moseley Braun, the first African-American woman to serve in the chamber.

Next followed Peter Fitzgerald, the Republican firebrand who stayed in the spotlight with his ongoing war against establishment figures of every stripe.

Now comes Barack Obama, who would be drowning in newspaper ink if not for his Olympic ability to swim laps in it. While he's a top contender for the Democratic nomination for president, some people might forget that the best-selling author and "Saturday Night Live" guest is actually the junior senator from Illinois.

In the meantime, there's Durbin, an affable Downstate native who cuts the unimposing figure of a government lawyer, or maybe an accountant. Bob Newhart, only in a crisper suit.
[From Dick Durbin's challenge -- chicagotribune.com]

We criticize the Dems quite a lot on these pages (from the left), but Durbin at least gets my respect, especially since he voted against the Iraq debacle in the first place.

Durbin was one of only 23 senators to vote against the original authorization to go to war in Iraq, saying he believed the Bush administration had failed to make the case for it.

Since then, he has been a regular critic of the way the president has carried out the war, and one of the most outspoken on the question of how far the American military should go in the interrogation of detainees.

and we also respect Durbin for this stance:

Two summers ago, Durbin gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he decried some of the reported interrogation techniques in use at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In that speech, Durbin read out loud from an e-mail from an FBI agent about "torture techniques" he witnessed at Guantanamo, including details of a scene in which a detainee was chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor with no chair, food or water. Prisoners had urinated or defecated on themselves and been left there for up to a full day, sometimes in ice-cold 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 control," Durbin said, "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."

He's right about how history will look back on the Bush Administration's wink-and-nod approach to torture, it won't be a kind look. Torture should never be an acceptable practice for American governments to engage in, or its citizens.

To guide him, Durbin acknowledges that he sometimes consults public opinion polls, trying to figure out how far he can go with his agenda.

"I read them as a politician," he says. "It's like reading the scores in a sports page. But there comes a time when you have to take a position that might not be popular.

"There aren't many of us who continued to raise this torture issue," he says. "It's not one that members like to talk about. It could hurt you politically."

He says he contemplates how future generations will judge this period in American history. "I think the issue of torture will be the same in the future as Japanese internment camps are today," he says. "We'll look back and say we should have acted differently."