On this episode of China Uncensored:
is the US any better than China?
Hi, welcome to China Uncensored
I'm your host Chris Chappell
the big news last week was the US Senate's release of its CIA torture report.
what's that?
no no I'm completely fine I've just been
awake for the last 180 hours
seven-and-a-half days with no sleep, and I'm totally okay
now I haven't been able to read the report for myself
but I'm sure its not like the CIA has been hiding
anything nefarious from the public
like waterboarding?
please,more like water bored.
I mean how bad could that be?
like a "series of near drownings".
okay. that sounds pretty bad.
But hey the CIA had to do it to get the kind of Intel that save lives and stop terrorism
they never got information about imminent attacks and didn't learn anything they didn't
already know
well I remember CIA director Michael Hayden saying they did get valuable information
They lied about it
okay but I mean the people they were torturing were terrorists
they weren't all terrorists
barely at least one person was just a
case of misidentification
what kind of idiot approved this thing
so when the US senate released its findings
from an investigation into CIA investigation techniques
they found that the enhanced interrogation techniques they were using
were actually discredited coercive interrogation techniques
such as those used by torturous regimes
during the Cold War to elicit false confessions
it was so bad that even the people doing the torturing
were disturbed by it
the CIA did a terrible thing that
the US needs to face up to and make sure never happens again
so from Beijing's perspective clearly
the moral of the story is chinese authorities
should be allowed to torture as many people as they want
not that they tortured, of course they don't
you might have missed that moral, though
through the huge amount of schadenfreude
in Chinese state-run media's
in-depth reporting on the CIA torture story
for example Communist Party mouthpiece Xinhua
wrote an editorial condemning the US for doing nothing
about its own human rights problems
that's right
why isn't the US talking about its own problems
except of course when the US Senate investigates the country's intelligence
agency and releases a fully unclassified report to the public
detailing the terrible atrocities they committed
but look I'm not trying to say the US is better than China
or that the CIA is somehow justified for what it did
i'm saying torture is bad especially when people
being tortured haven't committed any crimes
but the reason we now know about this is because people in the US government
spent 6 years investigating what happened
and now things can be done to stop it
no one's watching in China
there's no system of checks and balances
that's going to suddenly find the National People's Congress asking the secret police
if they've been torturing political prisoners again
so there need to be people and governments outside of China
keeping an eye on things -
which really, it seems like they happen
since the Chinese regime still does basically whatever it wants
while US companies keep tripping over each other
to throw money at it
also the CIA torturing people
while completely terrible doesn't mean I or any other individual
no longer has a right to want to see a better China
now if you'll excuse me i've a letter to write to congress
try doing that in China