Soldiers from Massachusetts and Hawaii who work at the U.S. military detention facility at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, gave visiting home-state senators a piece of their mind last week.
Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, and Daniel K. Akaka, Hawaii Democrat, met with several soldiers during a visit led by Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. John W. Warner, Virginia Republican.
Pentagon officials said soldiers criticized the harsh comments made recently by Senate Democrats.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, last month invoked widespread military outrage when he compared Guantanamo to the prison labor systems used by communist tyrant Josef Stalin, Cambodia's Pol Pot and Adolf Hitler.
"They got stiff reactions from those home-state soldiers," one official told us. "The troops down there expressed their disdain for that kind of commentary, especially comparisons to the gulag."
Good for them. Soldiers doing a hard job honorably deserved the chance to confront their accusers. Funny how a planted question about bogus armor shortages in Iraq are flogged on page one for a week but this seems to be unreported by the major media.
I dare say that Senator Kennedy's car has a higher fatality rate than Gitmo.
