Useless UN as Usual

Powerline:

The United Nations' Committee on Torture has called on the United States to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center. The panel said the U.S. should "cease to detain any person at Guantanamo Bay and close this detention facility, permit access by the detainees to the judicial process or release them as soon as possible."

The U.N. also criticized the practice of sending detainees to countries where torture is practiced, even where those countries have given assurances that terrorists will not be mistreated. Which raises a couple of questions: first, if the U.N. is concerned about the U.S. sending terror suspects to countries like Egypt, Jordan, etc., because their human rights record is so bad, what, if anything, has the U.N. tried to do about it? Has the U.N. taken any meaningful action against those countries, or is it only concerned about mistreatment of prisoners when it can be used as an opportunity to bash the United States?

Second, given that a large proportion of the Guantanamo prisoners come from the very countries the U.N. criticizes us for sending prisoners to, how exactly are we supposed to release them? A few weeks ago, there was publicity about a couple of Chinese prisoners at Guantanamo who were determined to be "innocent" in the sense that they had attended al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan for the purpose of carrying out terrorist acts not against the U.S., but against China. The administration would have been happy to release the two men, but for obvious reasons they didn't want to go to China, and we didn't want to admit them to the U.S. The problem was finally solved when a third party agreed to take them.

And we are so evil, the Al Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo knew that if they faked a hanging attempt our soldiers would rush in to save them, and they could attack us. Stop the ACLU here. Washington Post here.

The useless UN, giving dictators and thugs a pass as usual. Maybe they can house the prisoners in the UN building. Kofi can offer up his office for a nice little recreation area.