Sully almost never comments on China, so it was good to see him speak out against the Chinese government for its forcible “psychiatric tratment” of AIDS campaigner Hu Jia (scroll down to find the entry).

Sullivan cites a story from Human Rights Watch that correctly refers to this treatment as a form of torture.

Yes, a form of torture. But how can the U.S. now take a stand against this, when the president has memos drawn up explaining why torture is sometimes okay?

Did we ever think we’d see the day Sullivan would condemn Bush like this? Amazing.

Here’s what Human Rights Watch had to say about the treatment of Hu Jia.

When a fellow activist attempted to deliver some AIDS materials to Hu Jia on the evening of June 1, police refused to allow them to meet, and gave Hu Jia a brutal thrashing that resulted in injuries to his head and left arm. On June 3, four police officers forced their way into Hu Jia’s home and said they would be staying there to monitor his activities. When Hu Jia objected, they struck him in the presence of his father and mother, then took him away and detained him in a cold, damp basement for three days and three nights. Since releasing Hu Jia on June 6, police have continued their surveillance on his home, cutting off all of the family’s telephone access and refusing to allow Hu Jia to leave the house.

The more recent order for psychiatric evaluation is causing considerable distress to Hu Jia and his parents. Hu Jia’s parents see absolutely no sign of mental abnormality in Hu Jia, and are well aware that “psychiatric treatment” has been forced upon a number of dissidents and religious practitioners, sometimes resulting in them actually becoming mentally unstable. A source passed HRIC a message from Hu Jia’s family and friends calling on the international community to take note of Hu Jia’s desperate situation. The message states, “If the police forcibly commit Hu Jia to a mental hospital against the wishes of himself and his family, this constitutes using psychiatric treatment as a form of torture and political persecution.”

Anyone care to defend the government’s actions? Anyone care to tell Hu Jia to relax, because things are getting better, and reform is in the air?

Related post: The Indescribable Tragedy of AIDS in China

This will certainly add some fuel to the controversy.

A military intelligence analyst who recently completed duty at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (news – web sites) said Wednesday that the 16-year-old son of a detainee there was abused by U.S. soldiers to break his father’s resistance to interrogators.

The analyst said the teenager was stripped naked, thrown in the back of an open truck, driven around in the cold night air, splattered with mud and then presented to his father at Abu Ghraib, the prison at the center of the scandal over abuse of Iraqi detainees.

Upon seeing his frail and frightened son, the prisoner broke down and cried and told interrogators he would tell them whatever they wanted, the analyst said.

Whatever it takes. The new American Way, and the perfect formula for winning hearts and minds.

Update: Contemplating the approval by higher-ups of using attack dogs to terrify prisoners, Andrew Sullivan today comes to similar conclusions on our winning formula.

It seems to me to be getting clearer and clearer that Abu Ghraib was not the work of a few rogue soldiers. The dogs are among the least troubling tactics, of course. But when you also consider that up to 80 percent of the inmates at Abu Ghraib were guilty of nothing, you have to wonder who thought this was a good way to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis.

Stay tuned:

The Securities and Exchange Commission is formally investigating allegations that a Halliburton Co. subsidiary was involved in paying $180 million in bribes to get a natural gas project contract in Nigeria. Vice President Dick Cheney was head of the oil services conglomerate at the time.

Cheney was heading the company for five of the seven years in which the bribes were allegedly paid. This is in addition to the probe into alleged overcharges in Iraq by Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

It’s going to be a very busy summer, what with the election and so many investigations under way.

Stolen, headline and all, from Wonkette, who helpfully informs us that the fellow above “is a Sioux, not a Village People.”

China is actually admitting just how abysmal its police force’s track record is. I guess this openness is a good thing, but it’s hard not to be depressed by the numbers.

China’s law enforcers managed to solve only about 30 per cent of all reported cases last year, a ranking official said in a rare admission of the inadequacy of the country’s police.

This is just one concern in a litany of shortcomings listed on Thursday by Mr Zhang Xinfeng, Assistant Minister of Public Security, Xinhua news agency reported.

‘It should be soberly noted that a gap exists between the expectations of the Communist Party, the nation and the people and the actual ability of the police to solve cases and enforce the law,’ he said.

The efficiency of the police force had emerged as a public issue in China, as a loosening of social controls made crime easier, while media scrutiny had forced officers to become at least a bit more accountable.

Zhang also admitted the police frequently treat suspects brutally, hold them too long in prison, and are often in partnership with criminals.

You don’t say.

When I first got back to America I wrote about a book called What Should I do with My Life by Po Bronson. I never made it through the first half, as I found it got redundant and slow. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t benefit from it.

The key point, which I should have know without having to read about it, is that often the answer to the big question is right in front of our faces, but we don’t see it. Or rather, we refuse to allow ourselves to see it. We come up with a million reasons why we can’t do it — it’s not practical, we’re too old, we don’t have the experience, the capital, the time, the whatever. I was going through this angst because I had to face the painful fact that I wasn’t happy anymore being a PR executive. I enjoy the creative side of the business — the writing and the media relations part. I hate the account part, the billing and the counting of hours and preparing monthly reports jammed full of BS to justify our jacked-up invoices….

What the book said to me was, Look at what you do that you love and that you’re good at. That was pretty simple: I love to write, and it’s been the mainstay of all the work I’ve done from the day I got out of college. Why didn’t it hit me earlier? Why did I feel I “had” to work for a company as an account manager, doing work that’s topheavy in administration and spreadsheets — the things that give me nightmares?

After reading several chapters, it just seemed so obvious, like “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?” Only for years it was never obvious, because I just took it as a truth that I had to be a corporate man.

So I did something radical. I called four of my old friends from the local PR business, all of whom worked for me when I was with a dot-com back in the late 90s and who are now managing their own businesses. I met with them all and told them I was thinking of becoming a freelance writer, and asked if they had suggestions. Not only did they give me suggestions, but they all gave me work to do.

And the sky cleared even more. In just two weeks — about three days of work, spread out over 14 days — I wrote three press releases, edited a white paper, wrote a short article and a corporate brochure. And I earned a few thousand dollars. It was not an impossibility. It was not a pipedream. I can really do this. If I really go at it, creating a web site and marketing myself and networking, it could actually become a fulltime career. Is it possible? Can our career really be the thing we love?

“Follow your bliss,” Joseph Campbell tells Bill Moyers in the great PBS series, The Power of Myth. I thought it was too late for that, that I had boxed myself into a corner where it was PR Exec or nothing. I can’t really describe the sense of hope I felt upon realizing there are other possibilities, after “knowing” that there weren’t.

I was lucky the past few weeks. The work just came to me. It probably won’t be like that every week. But it was certainly a revelation, and it raised my hopes higher than they’d been in a long time. I can’t say that this is my true bliss, writing about storage networks and semiconductors. But it’s writing, and a lot of it (the brochure especically) was true creative writing. It’s a huge step in the right direction.

So even though I can’t say I adored Po Bronson’s book, I can say it made a differrence for me. So it was well worth the money I paid, and then some. I’ve been told by my friends that more writing projects are on the way. Strange how, just as Bronson says, once you look for these opportunities, the ones lurking right in front of your face (often invisibly), your life can take on a new meaning, and the answer to the question What should I do with my life? just sort of comes to you.

For three months, Cheng Yizhong, editor of Guangzhou’s crusading Southern Metropolitan Daily, has languished in prison, still not knowing what he will be charged with or when he’ll be in court. This article offers a good overview of the supression of the tabloid, and its ramifications for other Chinese media.

Staff [of Southern Daily] believe the problems go back to the newspaper’s exposure early last year of the death of Sun Zhigang, a young graphic artist arrested for not having a city resident’s permit, and then beaten to death by other prisoners in a police lockup at the instigation of his guards.

As the Southern Metropolitan Daily broke the scandal, Mr Cheng was contacted by a friend of the Guangzhou Communist Party’s political and legal committee chief, Jiang Guifang.

The editor was asked not to mention that Mr Jiang, in a speech only months earlier, had backed strong efforts by city police to round up migrant workers lacking stay permits.

Mr Cheng robustly refused, and the paper did mention the speech in a report last June.

Mr Jiang, the party’s legal chief, was then forced to make a humiliating “self-criticism” at an internal party meeting.

I find that scary as hell. Arrest and lengthy prison sentences (others at the paper have been sentenced to 11 and 12 years) for making a local party chief feel embarrassed. And, as the article says, it can only put pressure on other newspapers throughout China to limit or halt their criticism of party officials.

Media reform? I hear about it all the time. And I know there are pockets of true media reform in China, mainly in vertical publications with a very small readership. As for the mainstream media, they may be getting more avant garde, but they all know there is a danger zone, and if they venture into it their lives can be destroyed at the whim of a local official. Scary as hell.

Du Daobin, who threatened China’s stability by posting some essays on the Internet that questioned the wisdom of one-party rule, has been given a light sentence of three years in jail, suspended for four years. I think that means he’s going to be under house arrest.

Others found guilty of similar crimes have been far less lucky, some going to prison for as long as 11 years.

This was fairly predictable, since Du had become an international cause celebre. Five months ago I wrote, “Despite police reluctance, Liu Di was finally released, and the smart money will be on Du’s release as well. There is simply too much international attention on the case, and the government now has little choice.”

But to prevent the sprouting up of new mini-Du’s, China has announced the creation of a “vigilante web site” Chinese surfers can use to report pornography sites and, one would assume, cyberdissidents who threaten to destroy China’s stability with their lethal essays and doodlings.

The authorities behind the new website claimed at its launch that it would protect the common interest of Chinese web surfers and guide the healthy development of the internet.

On the site’s homepage is a space where examples of web abuse can be reported.

Officials said the privacy of those who reported offending web sites would be protected, while their operators would be warned to remove the material.

The officials stressed that the main aim of the site was to protect young people from harmful material, pornography in particular.

The problem is, “harmful” is in the eye of the beholder. We all know that the CCP sees harm in a lot of stuff that a sane and secure government would see as harmless. (Remember, they shut down Vagina Monologues and insist on policing Britney’s wardrobe.)

In any event, as the article points out, this is just another step on China’s part to strengthen government control of the Internet, an effort that I supect (and hope) is doomed to failure.

Update: Much more on Du Daobin over at Reporters without Borders.

Over at CNN, human rights attorney and columnist Joanne Mariner offers a sober wrap-up article on last week’s anniversary. Of greatest interest to me were its summaries of interviews with four of the student leaders. Especially this one:

Zhou Fengsou, a physics major at the time of the massacre, was never prosecuted for his role at Tiananmen Square. But after years of monitoring and police harassment, he finally left China for the United States.

He told Human Rights Watch that the protests at Tiananmen Square were “the biggest event” for his generation. “I feel lucky to have been a part. It was the one time I experienced the beautiful character of the Chinese people longing for a democratic China where we could freely speak our minds. We believed we could get there. Later I experienced the worst of human nature. People died.”

She closes on an idealistic note, and someone had better caution her not to hold her breath.

The horror of the killings at Tiananmen Square resonates both inside and outside of China. While memories of these events cannot be excised, they can be properly addressed.

Not only should the Chinese authorities publicly acknowledge responsibility for the killings, they should punish the perpetrators, compensate the families of the victims, and allow those who fled the country afterwards to return home.

Pigs should fly. John Ashcroft should tell the truth. Alas, not in this lifetime.

Other posts about Tiananmen Square:
Tiananmen Square revisited
Tiananmen Square re-revisited
The story behind the Tiananmen Square “tank man” photo

I wrote earlier about my phone number in China, which included the numbers 14114 (“I want to die — I want, I want to die!”).

Well, yesterday I was handed my new license plates. All the plates in Arizona start with three numbers followed by three letters. So of all the combinations of three numbers there are in the world, which combination is mine?

911.