Chinese media blasts US spin on torture report
December 11, 2014, 6:27 am

Activists are dressed up as prisoners to protest American torture in Chicago on Dec.10, 2014. Around 200 anti-violence activists held a peaceful assembly on the International Human Rights Day in Chicago [Xinhua]

The Chinese Communist Party-run Global Times, a newspaper known for its strident editorials said on Thursday that the US claims impunity for torture.

“It captured the lion’s share of global attention on Human Rights Day, but did nothing to jeopardize the US image. Few other countries can do the same,” said an editorial on Thursday.

“The US is able to spin such wicked acts as prisoner abuse to become a positive through mobilizing pro-US forces worldwide. It’s a result of US soft power. Positioned at the center of the global order, the US has incomparable abilities in controlling resources and discourse power,” it added.

Ben Emmerson, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism, has said that senior CIA and government officials from the administration of George W Bush who planned and sanctioned crimes must be prosecuted.

“Emmerson is widely considered too naïve,” said the Communist Party editorial.

“The US Senate took a rather tough attitude toward the CIA’s gruesome interrogations of terrorism suspects. However, such infringements of human rights are considered the most forgivable by Westerners. Therefore, the Senate’s censure is probably no more than mere moral scrutiny,” said the editorial.

The report released earlier on Tuesday by the US Senate Intelligence Committee said the CIA carried out “brutal” interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects in the years after the 9/11 attacks on the US and that 26 of 119 known detainees were wrongfully held.

None of the information collected through torture led to any meaningful or unique information for the CIA, added the explosive report.

China and Russia have repeatedly said the United States has no right to claim a mantle of moral leadership, pointing to secret CIA jails abroad and treatment of inmates at the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba and elsewhere.

US State Department’s annual “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices” routinely criticises Beijing and Moscow for alleged human rights violations. China had earlier this year retaliated with its own Cabinet report on “Human Rights Record of the United States in 2013”.

The Chinese editorial on Thursday also criticized the response in developing countries, including China, to the Senate report as misplaced and misdirected.

“In many developing countries including China, there has even been applause for US democracy after the release of these reports. They have paid attention to the courage of the US rather than the crime of prisoner abuse,” said the Global Times.

TBP