Senator Dick Durbin's statement on the Guantanamo Bay detention center has generated a vicious uproar in conservative circles. Durbin's comments have been cherry picked to summarize that the main thrust of his remarks is to call US Military personnel Nazis. But considered in full context, Durbin's charges address how torture is the antithesis of everything America is supposed to stand for.

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold....On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

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.

Erik Saar, former US Army linguist, who served at Guantanamo Bay, described the practices employed, but more importantly, how his writing was vetted by the Pentagon, so we're really not getting the complete picture of affairs:

Were dogs used?

Dogs were used on occasion, yes, ma'am.

How?

That's another thing that because the Pentagon vetted the book, I really can't speak outside of the scope of what I have written, unfortunately.

Were you concerned about that use of dogs?

To be honest with you, ma'am, one of the things I was trying to explain in the book is that, you know, I went to Guantanamo Bay with one expectation, and I had no reservations whatsoever about any techniques we were going to use and about the lack of a system of justice for the detainees, but really, what my experience was was that over time, I came to the conclusion by the time I left Guantanamo that we're making a drastic mistake here, and what I saw as a whole was inconsistent with who we are and the values we represent as a nation.

Basically, this argument boils down to whether you are pro-torture or pro-human-rights/anti-torture. It saddens me greatly to see torture celebrated and trivialized, that the detainment of individuals with no charges and no trial is a valid act. Or that checks and balances should be completely discarded and prisoners should be executed, no matter if they are guilty or if they just happened to net a reward bounty for some war chief in Afghanistan. And the bloodlust and thirst to revel in the mental and physical torture of untried "enemy combatants" should dishearten any Christian in America.