Last night on the Senate floor during a debate on the Energy Bill, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill) suddenly launched into a bizarre rant comparing the American military to Nazis, the Soviet KGB, and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. (Hat tip: Right Wing Conspirator.)

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.

UPDATE at 6/15/05 12:33:32 pm:

More on this craziness at The American Thinker, where they have a quote from Durbin describing the brutal torture that led him to those comparisons:

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 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.

Here’s a PDF file of Durbin’s statements.