We can choose to disagree on whether or not a desire to "save face" is a meaingful motivator in Chinese leadership's prosecution of its international affairs.

But explain this to me. If China's desire to be respected and "preserve face" is important, and they can't censor the world's media but they can censor their own (as was the case with Pres. Obama being critical of their "lack of press and internet openness"), and what IS important to any politician whether American or Chinese is their perception in the eyes of their citizenry often to the exclusion of reality--how would any amount of external pressure on China's leaders using our media ever actually yield changes internally if it wasn't in the Chinese leaders self-interest to do so?

Example: assuming you couldn't economically leverage China to close its "black prisons", and they can censor Chinese domestic media more effectively than America can its, what chance is there that sufficient inertia will ever develop among the Chinese masses to exert the political force to make Chinese leaders change?

We can't even stop torture as policy in America and we are supposedly citizens of a free country.

If you think "face saving" is a prime motivator I think your engaging in wishful thinking. Then I again I think you do that a lot and you disagree. So there we are again. Agreeing to disagree.

What makes you believe the "law" is meant to "keep you safe by preventing prospective harm to you or your property?"

It isn't designed, with rare exception (stays/TRO's/injunctions), to do that nor could it be designed to do that effectively. And even then it can't "prevent" anyone from doing anything. The law can only seek to remedy retroactively, however imperfectly and to the extent it can, "harm(s)" committed against another person or object.

That's as good as it gets.

The law is about tradeoffs. Some of you would rather trade off all YOUR PROTECTIONS AND MINE developed over 800 + years because you're frightened bed-wetting cowards afraid of some mythical boogeymen who cause less human harm in their entire history than car accidents or American hospital negligence does in one year.

Maybe if you had wanted these terrorists to face "justice" instead of forever foreclosing and tainting it you should have joined us "evil libruls" in decrying and preventing torture and indefinite detentions and the complete and utter destruction of the "rule of law" to calm your infantile fears.

Because this isn't justice this is an American theatre of the absurd and macabre.

But whatever. All your faux machismo and idiotic quest to chase phantoms with the US military doomed this from the get go.

Don't say we didn't warn you.

Should those people in the black prisons in China wait there until you think we've got our own garden in order before anybody brings up their cases?

Why exactly should "anybody" but the Chinese people be "bringing up" the issue of black prisons in China?

Are you seriously suggesting that some nation or some collection of them in the global community have the necessary "moral authority" + "economic horsepower" to change China's behavior 1 iota? If so who? Certainly not America and its allies.

The flawed "American Exceptionalism-Savior Mentality" writ large in your comment.

You are seriously misinformed about how the world works my friend. If you think anybody anywhere is capable of pressuring China to do anything China doesn't want to do of its own economic initiative you're kidding yourself.

There's three forms of leverage in this world: moral authority, military muscle, and economic power. Clearly one matters: the last.

We've lost the first assuming we ever had it and the second is intrinsically dependent on the last. In flushing the second down the toilet due to short term economic thinking, an unsustainable energy policy over the last 60 years, and overreliance on the third to artificially perpetuate those flaws, we're left with next to nothing.

The problem isn't lack of a better mouse trap, the problem is believing you can use a mouse trap to catch and cage the 800 pound gorilla that's eating your cheese.

What we are experiencing is the fastest rise and fall of an empire in the history of mankind. All its institutions are corrupted. Political, business, military, media, financial markets and last to fall the judicial systems. It might drag out another 50-100 years but that's about it. All in the span of 300-400 years.

Next comes the fall of our worldwide culture of totalitarian agriculture that undergirds our unsustainable population and energy consumption.