Someone do please call Sen. Durbin’s office.

The learned senator has equated the facility where we hold foreign irregular combatants, who have sworn enmity to the U.S. and who for the most part were captured either in the field or from intelligence developed from those captured in the field, to the GULag, that network of socialist re-forging enterprises run by the agency of which Dear Leader’s buddy Putin still considers himself identified, viz the KGB and its sundry predecessors, MGB, NKVD, GPU, OGPU, and Cheka.  He’s not the only member of Congress so to have publicly slimed his country.

Well, Sen. Durbin, this is how a modern, up-to-date GULag operates.  First, you have anyone who opposes you murdered, or disappeared, or charged with trumped-up criminal offenses.  Then when a bunch of young women have the temerity to protest what you do, you have them charged and convicted as well.  You then sentence them to several years in prison, and you ship them off to a labor camp.  The two remaining Pussy Riot singers (both under age 25, both with young children) have been removed, with no forewarning to their families, up to roughly 900 miles away.  The families first discovered the women had been removed when they attempted to send care packages to them at the Moscow prison where they’d been held.

Now let’s imagine you’re of an age to be married to a 25 year-old woman and have, say, a four year-old daughter.  Means you’re probably pretty young yourself.  Means you probably are a single parent now.  Or alternatively you’re a grandparent who’s just had the responsibility for a young grandchild dumped on you.  What is the likelihood that you’ll ever be able to afford to make a 900-mile trip to see your wife/child?  What’s the likelihood that that four year-old child will see her mother?

And just for the record, holding a prisoner in a cell sufficiently cold that he got the “shivers” is one thing.  Running Sukhanovka, a prison from which exactly one man is known to have emerged both alive and sane, is another.  For an inside look at Sukhanovka, written by that sole survivor, I refer the gentle reader to Alexander Dolgun, an American kid plucked in 1948, at age 20, from the streets of Moscow.  All that’s known right now is that the two Pussy Riot singers are somewhere in the Urals.

In the Urals, it gets down to -50 degrees Centigrade in the winter.