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