SINO-SHORTSITIS

There is nothing in the contemporary world thicker than the skin of George W Bush. On his way to Beijing to become the first sitting US president ever to attend an Olympic Games staged on foreign soil, Bush stopped off at Bangkok to deliver a lecture over the head of his uncomplaining host, Thai prime minister Samak Sundaravej, to the Chinese president, Hu Jintao.

“America stands in firm opposition to China's detention of political dissidents, human rights advocates and religious activists,” he said, flashing that trademark smirk that evidently betrays no intended irony. “We speak out for a free press, freedom of assembly and labour rights, not to antagonize China's leaders, but because trusting its people with greater freedom is the only way for China to develop its full potential. And we press for openness and justice not to impose our beliefs, but to allow the Chinese people to express theirs”.

Even while Bush was speaking, a military tribunal in the United States was holding a sentencing hearing for Salim Hamdan, who has been incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba for 61 months by the US’s reckoning (though he was apprehended in 2001). This poor shmuck was found guilty earlier in the week of “supporting terrorism”, which crime he perpetrated by being driver to Osama bin Laden. He has been given five years in military custody, including the time he has already served, but the Pentagon have made it clear that they do not intend to release him at the end of his sentence.

As the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, John Wesley Hall, drily observed, “the Pentagon must be very proud of itself today … it convicted a truck driver of being guilty of driving a truck”.

Washington does not pretend that torture is not used at Guantánamo, which, it should be remembered, is the facility that we know about. There are doubtless others operating in secret on American soil and it is known that there are yet more controlled by American authorities dotted around the world, operating under the quasi-judicial aegis of friendly or beholden governments. So Osama bin Laden’s luckless former driver will have been subjected to cruel and unusual punishment over a considerable period before he achieved the distinction of being the first military prisoner from Guantánamo to be brought to what passes for justice in Bush’s America.

Along with a willingness to flout international law governing the use of torture upon political and military prisoners and the terms under which such prisoners can be tried, the Bush administration has also introduced the term “extraordinary rendition” to the language. This is the practice of transferring war prisoners out of formal American jurisdiction to such nations as Syria, Egypt and former Soviet bloc satellites where torture is a way of life. Through CIA contact and control, America’s historic expertise in torture techniques is refined by personnel who have no responsibility to American law.

If the Bush administration has anything to teach the Chinese government about human rights, it will be news to all but the most partisan neocons. But China is an easy target for everyone just now. A couple of callow Brits may unfurl a ‘Free Tibet’ banner on a lamp-post outside the Bird’s Nest Stadium and suffer nothing worse than deportation because their images are available from every news agency in the world for 24 hours. I guess the London authorities will go no harder on, say, a handful of Moslem protesters who stage some trivial event ahead of the Stratford East Olympics in 2012.

I make no claim on the Chinese regime’s behalf. I have never been to Tibet, nor indeed to China. Like other viewers of television news bulletins. I have seen the smuggled footage of the brutal putting down of dissidence. Indeed – and like practically every other nation on the planet – China has a bloody history: at times, it has inflicted dictatorship and privation on its own people and sought and sometimes achieved genocide against the peoples of other nations, tribes and sects.

Britain’s human rights record is hardly blemish-free – if nothing else just now, we are complicit in the illegal use of torture and violation of other nations’ sovereignty practised by the States. It is idle, of course, to imagine that the Olympics could take place in some pure state untainted by the corruption of the world. After all, the modern Games is, as much as anything, a pageant of globalised capitalism. But if the Games becomes an ideological battleground for politicians and protesters, alike drawn by the spotlight already shining on the spectacle, it will be tough on the athletes, for whom the sporting events themselves really are the focus of attention (save, of course, for those participants whose primary focus is on getting away with the illicit enhancement of their performances). I have suggested before that a permanent Olympiad home on a site declared neutral and independent like Vatican City could avoid the difficulties inherent in bestowing the prestige of hosting the event on successive participants in the eternal jockeying between nation states. Nothing that has occurred during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics has altered my view.