{"id":4317,"date":"2008-08-07T22:05:26","date_gmt":"2008-08-07T21:05:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=4317"},"modified":"2008-08-07T22:05:26","modified_gmt":"2008-08-07T21:05:26","slug":"who-is-bush-to-lecture-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/contributions\/who-is-bush-to-lecture-china\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Is Bush to Lecture China?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Matthew Rothschild<\/a><\/p>\n

Who is Bush to lecture the Chinese\u2013or anyone, for that matter\u2013on human rights?<\/p>\n

There he was in Thailand, pressing China to uphold human rights when he has done more than any other President to heap scorn on them.<\/p>\n

After 9\/11, he said, \u201cI don\u2019t care what the international lawyers say. We\u2019re going to kick some ass.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Cheney said, it was time to go over to the \u201cdark side.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s exactly what Bush and Cheney have done.<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve illegally kidnapped hundreds of people and disappeared them into black sites.<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve had some of these victims tortured with waterboarding and made many others hang by their arms for hours on end.<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve held hundreds of people without charge for years in Guantanamo and at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

And they\u2019ve held thousands of people without charge for years in Iraq, often caging them in brutal containers.<\/p>\n

Time and time again, Bush and Cheney and their apologists in the Justice Department have asserted the right to flout international treaties on human rights essentially whenever they feel like it.<\/p>\n

They are serial human rights abusers.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what Amnesty International says in its 2008 annual report.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith breathtaking legal obfuscation, the US administration has continued its efforts to weaken the absolute prohibition against torture and other ill-treatment,\u201d the report notes. It denounced \u201cthe hollowness of the US administration’s call for democracy and freedom abroad,\u201d and said that the Bush Administration \u201chas distinguished itself in recent years through its defiance of international law.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bush has no standing whatsoever to be lecturing China\u2013even on labor rights, which he also did in Thailand.<\/p>\n

The Bush Administration has fined only 6 percent of the companies that had been violating federal wage laws, according to its own Labor Department. The rest got off.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that Bush\u2019s human rights abuses are equal to China\u2019s.<\/p>\n

But it is to say that he has left an indelible black mark on our own reputation.<\/p>\n

He has disgraced the values we\u2019re supposed to hold dear, and he\u2019s given an invitation to other countries to trample all over human rights with impunity.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what China has done.<\/p>\n

And Bush is in no position to scold them about it.<\/p>\n

He should scold himself first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Matthew Rothschild Who is Bush to lecture the Chinese\u2013or anyone, for that matter\u2013on human rights? There he was in Thailand, pressing China to uphold human rights when he has done more than any other President to heap scorn on them. After 9\/11, he said, \u201cI don\u2019t care what the international lawyers say. We\u2019re going […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[27],"class_list":{"0":"post-4317","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-contributions","7":"tag-bush"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}