The left has created a new battle-cry for criticizing the Bush/Blair “war-for-oil.” The new battle-cry: Make wild accusations about the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Democratic Senator Dick Durbin took up the battle-cry on the floor of the Senate:

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. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

The Gitmo inmates are treated far better than prisoners in say, China, Iran, Russia, or Saudi Arabia – each one gets a personal copy of the Koran. As Charles Krauthammer pointed out regarding Gitmo “abuses:”

The most inflammatory allegations have been not about people but about mishandling the Koran. What do we know here? The Pentagon reports (Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, May 26) -- all these breathless "scoops" come from the U.S. government's own investigations of itself -- that of 13 allegations of Koran abuse, five were substantiated, of which two were most likely accidental. …

Moreover, what were the Korans doing there in the first place? The very possibility of mishandling Korans arose because we gave them to each prisoner. What kind of crazy tolerance is this? Is there any other country that would give a prisoner precisely the religious text that that prisoner and those affiliated with him invoke to justify the slaughter of innocents? If the prisoners had to have reading material, I would have given them the book "Portraits 9/11/01" -- vignettes of the lives of those massacred on Sept. 11.

Mark Steyn also poured cold water all over Durbin’s lame commentary (false analogies):

Just for the record, some 15 million to 30 million Soviets died in the gulag; some 6 million Jews died in the Nazi camps; some 2 million Cambodians -- one third of the population -- died in the killing fields. Nobody's died in Gitmo, not even from having Christina Aguilera played to them excessively loudly. The comparison is deranged, and deeply insulting not just to the U.S. military but to the millions of relatives of those dead Russians, Jews and Cambodians, who, unlike Durbin, know what real atrocities are. Had Durbin said, "Why, these atrocities are so terrible you would almost believe it was an account of the activities of my distinguished colleague Robert C. Byrd's fellow Klansmen," that would have been a little closer to the ballpark but still way out. …

One measure of a civilized society is that words mean something: "Soviet" and "Nazi" and "Pol Pot" cannot equate to Guantanamo unless you've become utterly unmoored from reality. Spot the odd one out: 1) mass starvation; 2) gas chambers; 3) mountains of skulls; 4) lousy infidel pop music turned up to full volume. One of these is not the same as the others, and Durbin doesn't have the excuse that he's some airhead celeb or an Ivy League professor. He's the second-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Don't they have an insanity clause?

Added to that are the comments made by a very sober Natan Sharansky, someone who actually spent time in a real gulag. When asked by Time Magazine about Amnesty International labeling Gitmo as a “gulag,” Sharansky answered:

I have very serious criticisms of Amnesty. There is no moral clarity. It doesn’t differentiate between what I call fear societies and free societies. In the democratic world, there are violations of human rights, but they were revealed and dealt with. In a fear society, there are no violations of human rights because human rights just don’t exist. …

The hype surrounding Gitmo is much ado about nothing. It reminds me of the vitriol spewed by the right when they were obsessed with Bill Clinton. The shoe’s on the other foot now. The left has someone to hate and obsess over: President Bush. But I side with the right this time. The left would have us surrender to the Islamist murderers, and bend over to allow them to slit our throats and the throats of our children. We are at war with a most vile enemy. Time to start acting like we’re at war.