> Hypocrites (after the high up officials in charge of Guatanamo Bay are still walking unsanctioned).

Guantanamo Bay and the Xinjiang camps are not comparable. For all its faults, Guantanamo is essentially a POW camp that contains enemy combatants. No American citizens are detained there, and none were ever meant to be.

The Xinjiang camps were specifically built to forcibly indoctrinate civilian ethnic-minority Chinese citizens and suppress their community and culture. They operate on a much larger scale, and also provide a captive labor pool that's being exploited.

Guantanamo Bay held hundreds of people - a large proportion of them not even particularly important people, some of them completely randomly swept up - with no legal rights, under a Kafkaesque interpretation of the law.

> essentially a POW camp

The US government refused to treat people in Guantanamo Bay as POWs. That's why they called them "enemy combatants." POWs have rights.

Guantanamo Bay itself was only a tiny part of the larger War on Terror. The US ran prison camps scattered throughout the world, in which it tortured prisoners. The US kidnapped civilians and flew them to secret prisons, or to be tortured by allied countries like Egypt. One person was even kidnapped by American intelligence off the streets of Milan.

In Iraq, the US worked with Shiite militias that tortured and killed large numbers of people suspected of being sympathetic to the insurgency. The US itself ran prisons like Abu Ghraib, in which prisoners were tortured. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in Iraq, as a result of the illegal invasion.

No senior figure involved in these crimes was prosecuted.

So when the US government suddenly develops a conscience, consider me skeptical.

Some action is better than inaction, though

Whataboutism does not add to the discussion.

1. Oppressing millions of their own Chinese citizens is different than the imprisonment of several hundred.

2. The world must not be distracted by such facile whataboutism. What the CPC does to its people, from Xiangjiang to Hong Kong is terrible. Would I like to see the US clean up its own act? Sure. But in the meantime, I am happy to see the US take a string stance against CPC totalitarianism.

Are you suggesting it's worse to do something to "your own people" than to do it to "other people"?

Well, yes, in the sense that technically it's 'their' government. It's 'worse' when those who supposedly should protect you, instead abuse you, similar to how the BLM protests grew out of outrage about police brutality, even though it is a vanishingly small amount of the violence minority communities suffer.

From an outsider's perspective on human rights, would it be worse if a government mishandles citizens than if they mishandle foreigners?

I believe it really doesn't matter at all if it is actually about human rights, they're human in either case.

Of course it is.

Is it worse for the government to bomb a foreign country, or to bomb its own people? Of course they're both bad, but there's a reason the international community reacted one way to Syria and one way to the US invasion of Afghanistan.

> but there's a reason the international community reacted one way to Syria and one way to the US invasion of Afghanistan.

Yes, Syria has no nukes and no military power. That's the extent of the why. Russia, for examples, has nukes and military power, and look at what happened in Grosny and the international community.

But all of that is besides the point, of course. It's allegedly about human rights, not about only killing & torturing people as long as they're not citizens of your country, the secret law of civilized society.

From the point of view of international law, bombing a foreign country is far worse.

The "crime of aggression" is one of the most serious violations of international law that exists. One of the foundational principles of the post-WWII order is that countries cannot go to war against other countries, except in self-defense (very narrowly construed) or with permission from the UN Security Council.

What countries do within their own borders is much more their own business.

> there's a reason the international community reacted one way to Syria and one way to the US invasion of Afghanistan.

The reason is simple. Syria is not a powerful country, but the US is. Everyone recognized that the invasion of Iraq was aggression, and therefore illegal under international law. Nobody was willing to do anything about it, because the US was then the world's sole superpower.

Added to that, what happened to:

"Injustice to one is injustice to all"

I agree that the Falcons should be in prison, but there is a difference between putting a few hundred political extremists in jail, compared to a few million normal people based on their race.

So, no, not "hypocrites".

> based on their race

It's simply without a trial. All states have nice words for why they have to target whom they target. Let's not fall for propaganda.

The scale is different: true. But same-scale is not a prerequisite for hypocrisy.

Trials are irrelevant in China, because judges are part of the CCP.

the Uygurs are imprisoned based on their race. With or without trial makes no difference.

Well, some of those in Guantanamo are political extremists.

And some of them are probably normal people.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1539457/still-at-guantanamo

True, that's why I say the Falcons should be in jail.

But the intention is to catch extremists, the flaw is to not follow due process.

Whereas in China, the intention is to commit cultural genocide.

> few hundred political extremists

Like in Abu Ghraib, where they created a torture dungeon for thousands of Iraqis, from common criminals to suspect rebels, generally without trial?

This whole "no, it's just some really evil individuals that we tortured, we are the good guys here" narrative is disgusting.

> without trial

this is the main point. both states like to do it without trial.

That’s why state interests should be below individual interests. Otherwise what’s the point of a state?

Torture is illegal, with or without a trial. It is a war crime and/or a crime against humanity and should be prosecuted as such.

In China, trials are irrelevant, because there is no independent judicial system.

What's more important is intention. One side tries to catch murderers and sometimes does not follow due process.

The other side tries to kill off the culture of an entire people by violently "reeducation" millions of human beings.

Honestly, I find it disgusting that people here seem to be mostly fine with those crimes, and even try to defend them.

No doubt you'll find something about everyone but that doesn't mean anything.

Guantanamo was supposed to be for the worst of the worst terrorists. No doubt a few were mistakenly selected but by mistake (USA has no interest in spending so much money and limited resources on a, say, innocent Pakistani cab driver.)

China has essentially put in camps /jail millions and millions of its citizens, simply because they are Muslim. And they're trying to wipe out their identity.

Now tell me how they compare ?

Both did not have a fair trail. Saying it is only for group X but then not putting them on trail first is what both states do. Both say it is for "enemies of the state". Scale is probably different, you are right on that. But point fingers to other states while being dirty yourself is hypocrisy by definition.

> Scale is probably different

I'm not sure this is true. Could you please post the numbers at guantanamo and the numbers imprisoned at Xinjiang? That would help clarify this point, thanks.

There is about four(!!!) orders of magnitude difference.

>numbers at guantanamo

Hundreds at any one time, under a hundred currently, well less than a thousand peak[1]

>numbers imprisoned at Xinjiang

On the order of millions[2]

If you want to be disingenuous more effectively I suggest you get better and choosing when to ask for citations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps

> If you want to be disingenuous more effectively

That it was a deliberate disingenuity seemed to have flown far and high over your head. What do you think I was trying to do?

> (USA has no interest in spending so much money and limited resources on a, say, innocent Pakistani cab driver.)

I would like to educate you. USA has done just that.

as I said it was done by mistake and dug a bigger hole by not wanting to admit wrong etc etc. They are /were only a few hundred placed in Guantanamo so why would they want to fill them with innocent people? Its not like they didn't have enough Al Qaeda and Taliban over there to catch

> China has essentially put in camps /jail millions and millions of its citizens, simply because they are Muslim.

No. Because they are Uyghurs. The Hui are a totally different phenomenon; Islam is one of the traditional religions of China. (Granted, with much less uptake than Buddhism got.)

Non-Muslim Uyghurs who make themselves useful for the government don't seem to be doing so bad for themselves, from Shohrat Zakir, the chairman of Xinjiang, down to Uyghur prison guards who have been called out by some Kazakh victims as especially brutal. (Why do people forget about Kazakh and Kyrgyz Muslims in Xinjiang so often?)

And the "anti-extremism" push certainly applies to Hui Muslims as well, who had their mosques "renovated" to look less like mosques: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=763356996

> Non-Muslim Uyghurs who make themselves useful for the government don't seem to be doing so bad for themselves

The fact that certain individual Uyghurs are not targeted is not evidence that the reason oppressed Uyghurs are being oppressed is not "because they're Uyghurs". It's evidence that being a Uyghur can be mitigated.

But if you prefer, "because they are members of a group with very questionable allegiance". This phrasing picks up the other Turkic groups in the area while still clearly excluding the Hui.