Jayeless

Two days ago, on the eve of the Beijing Olympics, President Bush condemned China’s human rights record. From the safety of Bangkok, Bush referred to Chinese crackdowns on dissenters in the lead-up to the Games, and declared¹:

The United States believes the people of China deserve the fundamental liberty that is the natural right of all human beings.

Impeccable timing! The very next day, the US announced their intention to deprive Salim Hamdan, a poverty-stricken Yemeni taxi driver, of his fundamental liberties. Hamdan’s crime was the identity of his employer — he was Osama bin Laden’s driver. For over five years he was locked up at Guantanamo Bay, awaiting trial. Over the last couple of weeks, he was duly tried, and the military tribunal decided that driving around a known terrorist is a crime, but that it was his only crime. He was sentenced to 66 months. He has already served 61.²

In any freedom-loving society governed by the rule of law, you’d expect that he would be released in five months. However, the US is no freedom-loving society governed by the rule of law. (As further proof of this, see again who tried him.) On the subject of Salim Hamdan’s fate once he’d served his time, the Pentagon had this to say³:

He’ll still be retained as an enemy combatant.

WTF, USA? You have established a military base on Cuba and decided no national law applies there. Among your inmates are respected journalists (e.g. Sami al-Hajj) and you torture these people for years on end hoping they’ll divulge something you can charge them with. You pretend all of this is legitimate, that you’re still the land of the free despite it all, but how can you keep pretending? That military tribunal was your pathetic attempt to restore some semblance of respectability to the joint, and you’ve just announced that you intend to ignore it?

China’s certainly not a free country, but China doesn’t pretend to be. There is no freedom of speech in China, no freedom of the press, and they even have labour camps they send their citizens to without trial⁴. However, China’s not the one pretending to be the “leader of the free world”. China makes no secret of where they stand. They cop a lot of flak because of it, but at least they’re honest. In that regard, they’re one step ahead of you, USA.

1. Reuters: Bush scolds China on rights day before Games [↩]
2. Reuters: Bin Laden’s driver gets 5 1/2 years in prison [↩]
3. BBC News: All sides claim Guantanamo trial win [↩]
4. BBC News: Chinese man held for quake photos [↩]

About a month ago, my Psychology class started studying unit 2. At the onset of this unit, our teacher smiled apologetically and said, “Now, I feel it’s only fair to warn you before we start. When you’re studying psychological diseases and their symptoms, you’ll start diagnosing yourself with every chemical imbalance and disease you read about. You don’t have them, OK? Everyone feels depressed sometimes, and everyone has trouble concentrating at times, and everyone gets the shakes occasionally… it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, OK? So don’t stress about it.”

At the time, this sounded like a really weird warning. Was she sure the entire class would start diagnosing themselves with everything we studied? But… why would we do that? It didn’t sound like a very rational — or likely — thing for us all to start doing. As a result, I completely disregarded this warning… and let my guard down.

I haven’t been feeling well today. It’s probably one of those all-too-common winter bugs, but a really weird one: no coughing, no sneezing, no sore throats, no aching joints. Instead, I feel like I’m just… not functioning. It’s hard to say that, because I clearly am getting by. It’s just that there’ve been so many little lapses in… functioning… and since we were studying neural diseases all morning they seemed a lot more significant than usual. Read on…