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Angry Chinese Blogger:
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USA: Only we have the right to torture terror suspects
When ACB was much younger, indeed when ACB's parents were much younger, the big bogeyman that the West feared was communism. It was Red this and Red that, and Reds under the beds. Western leaders were frantic with fear that anything and everything was a communist plot, and they would use the fear of communism to excuse just about any wickedness that you can imagine. Laws were bypassed, morals were put to one side, and pretty much every article of the US constitution, except (and rather ironically) the second amendment, was violated to "protect" the West from a so-called threat that largely existed because were as afraid of the West as the West was of them.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union ACB had though that those days were over. A relic of the past. And for a while they were. The Cold War ended and so too did the recriminations, the twisted morality (or rather the abject lack of morality), and the blatant double standards that went with it. Unfortunately, the same generation that saw then end of the cold War also saw the start of the so-called War on Terror, and with it the return of the twisted morality and contorted logic that went with the former. And amongst these twistings of logic and contortions of both law and morality there can be few better examples than the black hole that is the POW camp at Guantanimo Bay. A place were POWs are declared not to be POWs, and where act that ACB used to know as War Crimes regularly take place. But what, I hear you ask? does this have to do with China? Well, and as is often, Guantanimo Bay contains a number of POWs who are of interest to Beijing, but whom Washington doesn't quite now what to do with.
Here is a short article for America's News Week Magazine which ACB believes illustrates the situation nicely.
Care of Dahlia Lithwick, News Week Magazine:
In September, an appeals court found that one of the Uighurs, Huzaifa Parhat, had been labeled an "enemy combatant" and subject to indefinite detention, based on "bare assertions." The Bush administration has conceded that none of the Uighurs is an enemy combatant. Last week a federal judge in Washing-ton ordered that all 17 Uighurs be freed, immediately, into the care of American supporters. Bush administration officials managed to delay their release in a last-minute petition to the appeals court. These Uighurs didn't just steam into Guantánamo Bay off a Carnival cruise. They were brought here in error and abused in error. And now to remedy that error they will be forced to stay there indefinitely. As Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in a landmark Supreme Court decision this past summer, "The costs of delay can no longer be borne by those who are held in custody." The Justice Department managed to halt the ruling, by repeating discredited claims that the Uighurs associated with terrorists, and squawking about the perils of bringing Guantánamo to Washington. But in truth, Guantánamo has been in Washington for some time. Newly released military documents prove that two American citizens held for years as enemy combatants at Navy brigs in Virginia and Charleston, S.C., had been interrogated and incarcerated according to the Guantánamo rules, not U.S. law. According to e-mails that surfaced last week, Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla were interrogated by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency for months and years in the early part of the war on terror, and deprived of light, correspondence and human contact, while their nervous interrogators worried for their sanity.
As has so often been the case when illegal conduct is authorized at Guantánamo, it was military officials who pushed back. Career military personnel were the first to cry foul at prisoner abuse and biased prosecutions at the base. And last week's documents indicate they were openly dubious about what one described as "the 'lash-up' between GTMO and Charleston" when it came to American citizens detained in the United States. Jonathan Hafetz of the ACLU's National Security Project explains that while we may only now be officially discovering that interrogation policy had spread from Guantánamo to the United States, the wall between what was constitutional here and there was never insurmountable: "For years, the administration defended its detention and treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo by asserting that the Constitution did not apply because it was outside the United States. But the documents show the administration was meanwhile secretly trying to create a lawless enclave within the country."
Both presidential candidates have called for the closure of Guantánamo, and when that happens, the remaining prisoners will likely be brought to this country for prosecution, detention or deportation. Once these prisoners go on trial here, we will have to stop thinking of them as "them." It will be harder to tune them out when they are not just nameless men behind barbed wire, but real people with stories and families and names. What happened in secret for six years at Guantánamo will start to redefine what it means to be American. And that's why it's a fitting coda for the whole Gitmo fiasco that former enemy combatants who had no connection to terror or terrorism may someday take up residence in our own backyards."
As ACB understands it, Washington is concerned that:
1) Beijing is accussing these men of being terrorists, despite there being no evidence
2) That Beijing will detain them for an extended period of time without charge or trial
3) That these men will be held in inhumane conditions and that they will be interegated without mercy or due consideration
4) That they will be tortured
5) That Beijing intends to convict them without fair representation or due process
ACB finds it rather ironic that in the name of "Keeping America Safe" Washington felt fully justified in doing numbers 1 though 4 to these men, and that it fully intended to do number 5 to them as well, yet it balks at the thought of China doing the exact same thing in the name of "keeping China Safe".
ACB also finds it rather amusing, in a sad of way, that they great and powerful America has cast its eyes over the world looking for somewhere safe to deposit these men, rather than returning them to China, yet those same said eyes barely glanced at any portion of the world that might even loosely be classed as US real-estate.
Communism was a "so-called" threat? I guess the whole Korean war thing was
just a misunderstanding? Have you read Mao: The Unknown Story? I'd also
suggest reading the Mitroykhin Archive for a complete understanding of how
Communist spies and agents systematically murdered, misinformed and
manipulated with the express intent of destroying Western civilization.
Communism is an evil, failed ideology that has always been expressly
dedicated to taking over the world. Islam is no different. Yes, what
happened to those Uighurs sucks, what was the alternative? Are they not now
being settled in the US? And "torture" in the US? Any evidence of that?
More the contrary, as the article you quote with evident belief says the US
won't return them to China for fear of torture.
Ah, the naivety of youth. Yes, the Communists were a pretty nasty bunch of
people, but for every 10 Reds that the West believed were under the beds
there was probably really only one small socialist waving a placard. The
real Red menace was overblown and exaggerated by a paranoid US that feared
socialism and a newly vulnerable Britain that had lost the comfort of its
empire and suddenly felt very small and alone.
Yeah, I guess you're right, I'm a naive idiot. Everything is the fault of
America. "Torture" is whatever you decide it to be. Communism is totally
awesome and I can't wait to pay jizya.
You've done a fine job here, ACB. I found your analysis at the bottom to
have been done with a great deal of aplomb. I had overlooked those matters
of irony until you brought them to my attention. I thank you for that.
Rob Bigg:
There is no "good" side to communism. You can dress a pig up any way you
want..but it is still a pig.
That's why the world invented socialism. It's like communism but with
private enterprise and ownership.