I am not for giving China a pass. What I didn't like was quoting some Brit criticizing China and then thinking you've done something valuable. King is usually a good reporter. This was lazy and sloppy. If the average American demands that his or her country be represented as something more than the sum of its more miserable actions, China is entitled to the same courtesy. It's easy for some British dude to throw stones at China. It's even easier to pick up his words, cut and paste them, and think you yourself have said something important about China and the Olympics. What's hard is to contextualize a serious problem.

China wants to manage great change and a huge economic upheaval without the same kinds of troubles that Europe and America had dealing with "The Great Transformation" (as Polanyi called it). Remember, our deadly Civil War was in part a reaction to the rise of a new kind of economy and society in the North and the friction this caused with the South. Europe had 1789, 1848, and 1917/18. China wants the new economy and consumer society, all without social and political upheaval. The cost is a massive dose of oppression (but comparatively fewer deaths than in the European/America cases).

This is not a choice I endorse. In fact, I think it's a lousy tradeoff: surrender your freedom, gain economically. But I think the same is true with our "security vs. freedom" tradeoffs since 9/11. In all this, I may be wrong, but I am consistent. But wagging my finger self-rightously at the Chinese doesn't help much. Saying to all the world that freedom is a good thing, and then practicing what we preach may prove a damn sight more effective, because when foreigners point their fingers at us, we don't reform our actions, we circle the wagons and condemn anyone who "sides" with the foreigners.

Boy, you've got to have a vindictive streak twenty miles wide to even consider that punishment as fitting the crime. What's so insidiously rotten about the system is the sham of having a "jury." A jury of one's peers exists under the Anglo-Saxon legal system to protect the rights of the accused. It's always been that way. A bunch of army officers are in no way an impartial jury. First, they tend to see this whole thing as a war, and they are trained to ignore, bend, or break rules in order to win such things. Second, many have friends and colleagues who have fought, been wounded, or killed in Iraq, and way too many of these guys cannot or will not differentiate between our invasion of Iraq and the "Global War on Terrorism." So thier impartiality is questionable at best. And third, if they overcome issues one and two raised above, they are still career military men, and subject to retaliation by those who are above them in the chain of command and don't like how they voted. Such incidents have already been documented (historically minded folks need only look at what happened to the few officers who had the guts to vote Not Guilty in the Dreyfus Case).

What is needed, if you insist on this military tribunal system, is a senior officer from the JAG Corps acting as a sole judge of the case. Such a person will still face pressure, but they have some understanding of what law and custom actually are under our system of justice, and cannot be as easily coerced into handing down an "acceptable" verdict.

A wonderful closing scene in the film "Judgment at Nuremberg."

Burt Lancaster has been found guilty.

He is a man with an excellent record as a fine judge, but when the Nuremberg Laws were passed, he couldn't help but send a Jew to his death for "racial pollution" (look that one up, sparky).

He tells the judge who sentences HIM at Nuremberg, that he never thought it would come to THAT (i.e., the Holocaust).

Spencer Tracy responds: "It came to that the first time you sent a man off you knew was innocent."

My government wanted to EXECUTE this jerk, for the crime of driving Osama bin Laden around in a car. They have stripped him of all rights and dignity for several years, and placed him under brutal confinement. He has already paid a serious price for his choice of employer. I have no problem with him paying a further price, if the government has evidence that he committed a real, honest to God crime, either injuring people and supplying them with the means to do so. They had all the cards stacked in their favor. The Government still couldn't make their charges stick. And yet they threaten this man with life imprisonment. And wanted to shoot him. For being a driver.

Did we bother to shoot Hitler's driver? No. Did anyone in 1945, after 300,000 GIs had died and much of the world gone up in flames, have seriously argued that we should have? Of course not.

Get a grip, and some perspective.