Associated Press

Nov. 3, 2002

CAIRO, Egypt -- Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said in a rare interview that he believed the American and British determination to make war on Iraq could collapse under the weight of anti-war sentiment in the two countries.

"Time is in our favor, and we have to buy more time, hoping that the U.S.-British alliance might disintegrate because of ... the pressure of public opinion on American and British streets," Saddam told the Egyptian weekly Al-Osboa in the interview published Sunday.

"The demonstrations in the Arab and Western world include hundreds of thousands of peace-loving people who are protesting the war and aggression on Iraq," he said, apparently referring to protests in the United States and around the world last month.

Pointing to Arab public opinion as a force in Iraq's favor, Saddam also appealed to Arab leaders to defend Iraq. Arguing that Washington's goal was to control Mideast oil, he said that after attacking Iraq, U.S. forces could strike at other Arab countries and non-Arab Iran.

Most of Saddam's statements were standard Iraqi rhetoric -- he blamed "Zionist schemes" for Iraq's troubles and said invading Iraq would not be "a picnic" for American and British forces.

But his references to anti-war demonstrations in the West were the first signal he believed protests could undermine President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the chief advocates of attacking Iraq.

Al-Osboa said the interview took just over two hours and was conducted at one of Saddam's presidential palaces on the outskirts of Baghdad, with Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz present.

Reporter Sayed Nassar made the trip from his hotel in Baghdad to the interview in three different government-owned luxury cars, each with curtains over the side windows.

While the United States has said it wants to oust Saddam to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the Iraqi president maintained in the interview that America's real design is to take control of Middle East oil to serve the interests of its ally, Israel.

"The Arab oil will be under the U.S. control and the region, especially where oil flows, will be under full American hegemony. All this serves Israel's interest with the aim of turning it to a vast empire in the region," Saddam said.

U.S. officials have consistently argued their goal is not to control Iraq's oil.

Saddam said that Washington's plan was to first attack Baghdad, then other "rebellious Arab capitals" that oppose American control over the region.

Saddam said that while the United States has far greater military power than Iraq, U.S.-led coalition forces could not expect to walk over Iraq as they did the Taliban in Afghanistan.

"We will never make it a picnic for the American and British soldiers," he said.

more of this. . . from the Boston Globe

Saddam's shop of horrors



By Jeff Jacoby, 10/31/2002

S A BOY, writes Kenneth Pollack in his masterful new book on Iraq, ''The Threatening Storm,'' Saddam Hussein would heat an iron poker until it was white-hot, then use it to impale cats and dogs. Years later, when he had boys of his own, he would take them into prisons so they could watch - and get used to - torture and executions. The Arab world is replete with dictators, many of them ruthless. But for sheer unbridled cruelty, none of them can touch Saddam. And for hellish and sadistic brutality, no other Arab state - perhaps no other state in the world - can compare with what Saddam has created in Iraq.



Writing in The New Republic recently, foreign correspondent Robert Kaplan recalled the treatment meted out some years back to Robert Spurling, an American technician working in Baghdad. Spurling ''had been taken away from his wife and daughters at Saddam International Airport and tortured for four months with electric shock, brass knuckles, and wooden bludgeons. His toes were crushed and his toenails ripped out. He was kept in solitary confinement on a starvation diet. Finally, American diplomats won his release. Multiply his story by thousands, and you will have an idea what Iraq is like to this day.''

Spurling was one of Saddam's luckier victims; he survived. Many thousands of others have been executed outright or tortured to death - or forced to witness the torture or murder of their loved ones.

In June, the BBC interviewed ''Kamal,'' a former Iraqi torturer now confined in a Kurdish prison. ''If someone didn't break, they'd bring in the family,'' Kamal said. ''They'd bring the son in front of his parents, who were handcuffed or tied, and they'd start with simple tortures such as cigarette burns, and then if his father didn't confess, they'd start using more serious methods,'' such as slicing off one of the child's ears or amputating a limb. ''They'd tell the father that they'd slaughter his son. They'd bring a bayonet out. And if he didn't confess, they'd kill the child.''

Horror in Saddam's Iraq takes endless forms. In 1987-88, Air Force helicopters sprayed scores of Kurdish villages with a combination of chemical weapons, including mustard gas, Sarin, and VX, a deadly nerve agent. Scores of thousands of Kurds died horrible deaths. Of those who survived, many were left blind or sterile or crippled with agonizing lung damage.

But most of the Kurds slaughtered in that season of mass murder were not gassed but rounded up and gunned down into mass graves. Those victims were mostly men and boys, and their bodies have never been recovered.

In one village near Kirkuk, after the males were taken to be killed, the women and small children were crammed into trucks and taken to a prison. One survivor, Salma Aziz Baban, described the ordeal to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, who reported on Saddam's war against the Kurds in The New Yorker in March.

More than 2,000 women and children were crammed into a room and given nothing to eat. When someone starved to death, the Iraqi guards demanded that the body be passed to them through an window in the door. Baban's 6-year-old son grew very sick. ''He knew he was dying. There was no medicine or doctor. He started to cry so much.'' He died in his mother's lap.

''I was screaming and crying,'' she told Goldberg. ''We gave them the body. It was passed outside, and the soldiers took it.''

Soon after, she pushed her way to the window to see if her child had been taken for burial. She saw 20 dogs roaming in a field where the dead bodies had been dumped. ''I looked outside and saw the legs and hands of my son in the mouths of the dogs. The dogs were eating my son.''

Horror without end. Amnesty International once listed some 30 different methods of torture used in Iraq. They ranted from burning to electric shock to rape. Some governments go to great lengths to keep evidence of torture secret. Saddam's government has often flaunted its tortures, leaving the broken bodies of its victims in the street or returning them, mangled and mutilated, to their families.

For the second time in a dozen years, the United States is preparing to go to war against Iraq, this time with ''regime change'' as an explicit goal. The case for military action is being made primarily in the name of international law and stability: Iraq under Saddam egregiously violates UN resolutions, attacks other countries without cause, aids terrorists, uses and stockpiles biological and chemical weapons, actively pursues nuclear weapons, and purposely creates environmental catastrophes.

Saddam has successfully resisted every form of outside pressure short of war. Neither sanctions nor inspections nor missile strikes have subdued his aggressiveness. His regime is profoundly dangerous and will grow even more so if it is not destroyed.

All true. But let us not forget something equally true: Saddam has been an unspeakable evil for the people of Iraq. In crushing him and his dictatorship, we will be liberating the most cruelly enslaved nation on earth and performing an act of nearly incalculable mercy.

Recall Saddam's miscalculation when he invaded Kuwait. He figured the US would do nothing in retaliation. He was wrong.

Now he appears to be presuming that the administration gives serious credence to the ravings of street demonstrators.

That's a hoot!

Purely rhetorical on my part. . .

those of us on the Right serve the interests of humanity by relentlessly working for liberty and freedom.

It is axiomatic that a governmental system based upon individual liberties is MORALLY superior to any other. The Left despises individual liberty because it means such awful things as "unequal" distribution of wealth (ie. "fair" distribution of wealth), and NASCAR races.

Freedom and Liberty, eh? Freedom to do what, Liberty to do what? Details, details.

Axiomatic? Hardly. When "individual liberties" means corporations have the same rights as human beings, morality has been reduced to a commodity, like everything else.

You think it is a good thing that Michael Eisner makes $9500 per hour (for purely useless shit) and a Dominican seamstress makes $.40 per hour for sewing clothing, right? Yea, your morals are waay superior. And pigs can fly.

Point

it doesn't matter what I think about Eisner's salary. Capitalism doesn't put one person in charge of determining the financial value of one's contribution to society. Communism does (or pretty close).

The millions of free people of the world have decided that the entertainment products made by Disney are so valuable that they will happily part with their money to view them.

Maybe you think that's a poor decision on their part, but that's still freedom at work.

And, unlike the slaves who toiled away under communism, the subsistence level worker in a capitalist society is not indentured to that position. Your seamstress, here in America, is free to do what millions of Americans have done: improve her lot in life. A peasant in China does not that option.

So, by giving the poor, the hungry and the ragged masses the FREEDOM to improve their lives, the Right takes a position morally superior to those who would enslave the masses.

SheMex: "Capitalism doesn't put one person in charge of determining the financial value of one's contribution to society."

...yes it does, it's called a "boss"...but I guess that's too esoteric for you...

shows how small-minded one must be to be a Leftist.

Your boss can't make you stay at a job. . . your boss can't limit your earning potential. . .

Only YOU can make yourself stay at a job where you're not earning what you're worth. YOU decide what income opportunities you will pursue, and which you will forgo.

(Sadly, that cannot be said for folks living under communism.)

One of the reasons that Leftists hate freedom (and golf) is that in a free society, people's lives are what they make of them. If you screw your life up. . . that's what you get.

You can blame someone else for your lot in life. . . if that's what you want. But no one's gonna care except others who are similarly situated.

But the miracle of America is that if you choose NOT to sit around blaming others for your lot in life. . well then you CAN improve yourself.

No matter what. No matter how bad you've had it, someone else in this country has overcome worse to attain success.

Hell, look at all the Vietnamese boat people, coming here with nothing other than lint in their pockets, and now their kids are graduating valedictorian all over the State.

Did they sit around and whine about their bosses??

(The golf analogy is obvious if you know the game. If your ball goes in a lake, there's only one reason its there: you hit it there.)

Blah blah blah, SheMex...you said something stupid and I pointed it out, which pretty much describes all your posts.

You said this: "Capitalism doesn't put one person in charge of determining the financial value of one's contribution to society. " I pointed out that yes, indeed it does, it is called a boss. Now you can move here there or anywhere, but it will always be your boss that determines your financial value TO THE COMPANY...because NOBODY PAYS YOUR FOR YOUR "Contribution to society", dickhead.

Don't you ever get tired of being proven to be an ignorant lying lackey?

I'm being called ignorant by a man who has never heard of "self-employment".

Sheesh.

...you still have a boss if you are self-employed, douchebag...you are your employer...maybe THAT"S WHY THEY CALL IT "SELF-EMPLOYED"....

...fuckin' dimwit....

aren't thinking. Forget about propaganda for a bit, let's do a little thinking on actual reality. Capitalism, your term, determines that it is your net worth that represents your contribution to society, whether you worked for it or not. Morality based on the bottom line is lacking in humanity, to put it mildly.

Freedom based on one's net worth is by definition a proscribed liberty.

--------------

The millions of free people of the world have decided that the entertainment products made by Disney are so valuable that they will happily part with their money to view them.

-------------------------

If you substituted "mindlessly" with "happily" in your paragraph above, I would be in complete agreement. The propaganda mills that are known as the Media are filled with trivia to distract the mass of people from actual issues: health care, access to clean water, healthy food, essential utilities.

----------------------------------

Maybe you think that's a poor decision on their part, but that's still freedom at work.

-----------------------------------------

If that is freedom at work, let's give it a permanent vacation. Fortunately, it's not actually freedom at work, rather it's all that's available. Priorities, my man, priorities. If we have as our priorities the fulfillment of basic amenities for all people, there will not be huge resources devoted to useless shit while such amenities are not yet available.

But then you would call the fact that my health insurance just went up by 25% this year "freedom at work."

----------------------------------------------

And, unlike the slaves who toiled away under communism, the subsistence level worker in a capitalist society is not indentured to that position. Your seamstress, here in America, is free to do what millions of Americans have done: improve her lot in life. A peasant in China does not that option.

--------------------------------------------------

When did you last get your info on China? As they continue their long march to the market economy, the amount of people in dire straits has increased.

----------------------------------------------------

So, by giving the poor, the hungry and the ragged masses the FREEDOM to improve their lives, the Right takes a position morally superior to those who would enslave the masses.

---------------------------------------------------------

Where do you get this shit? It looks like you took it out of a little red book somewhere and inserted "Right" in strategic places. . .At any rate, as I stated above, the amount of "freedom" in a mercantile state is directly proportional to the size of your net worth. That pretty much gives the right of the masses to stew in their hovels a big kick in the ass, eh? What with corporations writing laws and shit, I mean.

Point

Okay. . . and if you're the boss of yourself than is it not true that YOU DECIDE YOUR COMPENSATION? . . and isn't that what I said in the first place?

I think you better be careful about calling people dimwitted.

I think you sum up the Left's position well.

You say:

If you substituted "mindlessly" with "happily" in your paragraph above, I would be in complete agreement.

We get it, the Left thinks they know better than the rest of us. . . and that they should therefore make decisions for us. Sorry if we bristle at that concept, master.

And your history is a little off:

"When did you last get your info on China? As they continue their long march to the market economy, the amount of people in dire straits has increased. "

Some 20 million Chinese died during the "Great Leap Forward", perhaps 10 million in one year alone.

I know its bad manners to remind the Left of the millions of unmarked graves left behind in its wake of good intentions, but facts are facts.

Once again, SheMex proves her utter ignorance of the real world...

She writes: "Your seamstress, here in America, is free to do what millions of Americans have done: improve her lot in life. A peasant in China does not that option. "

Been to China? No? Know much about the apparel industry there? No...well I do. I've been to China...I know a little bit about the apparel industry there and in the US...guess where I found the worst sweatshops, in China or the US???

Take a guess, lil' MissMex?

Anyway, seamstresses in China in some cases have it better, MUCH better than their counterparts here in the good ol' US, or in a protectorate like Saipan. And they can AND DO improve their lot...I have met many self made Chinese in the industry.

So, there you go, talkin' shit when what you need is a good dose of reality....

you took your trip to China AFTER the market reforms which Point referred to above. . . you know, the one's which Point says have made life worse for the Chinese???

Anyway, your anectdotal "evidence" aside, every year, thousands of Chinese risk their lives trying to get to this country. . . not to be oppressed. . . but because we offer them the kind of freedom which the workers paradise can't begin to imagine.

You just don't see to many Americans lining up to immigrate to China to go work in slave labor shops!

Sorry to break that truth to you.

Wanna try adressing the points? No? Didn't think so, when all bluster fails claim victory in defeat and move on, huh SheMex?

You are a coward...no fuckin' balls, not one hair on your ass, little boy....

You're point? You're point is just to say, which I have no reason to believe, that you've been to China, and, against all empirical evidence, have formulated the opinion that it is better to be in a Chinese sweatshop than one in LA. . .

Then you spew your usual insults.

I haven't been to China. . . but I've known enough people who have fled that totalitarian hell hole for this great land to know you're full of bs.

...wonder why you are soooooo hung up with slave shops in China when we have our own right here in LA....how come I don't hear you tirading about that? Wouldn't make more sense to speak out against abuses in your own country where you have more leverage than another country where you do not?

...never mind....I guess I lost you when I went into that "making sense" territory....and you are not paid to do that.....but in fact paid to do the exact opposite....

...what I said was that I have been to shops in LA and China that serve most of the well known apparel brands, and by far the worst shops are in LA, and in the protectorates...forget about it!

Now if you are actually concerned with the working conditions of seamstresses in America, you would think that that fact would bother you...but of course....well.... let's just say it doesn't fit with your "agenda".

I just don't know how you can stand knowing that some working conditions in a COMMUNIST country are better that those in your own back yard?!?!? Why aren't you rising up with indignation?

I don't know what "emperical evidence" is dancing around your distorted imagination, but there are many reasons for this, trade quotas, labor costs, social compliance laws that apply to foreign suppliers but not domestic, many things for which there is ACTUAL emperical evidence, but have nothing to do with your parrotted spewings.

Ain't so good.

HONG KONG – When thousands of laid-off workers marched down Victory Road in Liaoyang, China, this month, protesting corrupt factory leaders, the foreign media was tipped off by something called the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy. When an evangelical Bible smuggler faced a possible death penalty in China early this year – the world knew through the center.

Of the known human-rights cases in China, about two-thirds first come to light from the Hong Kong-based outfit, China watchers say.





E-mail this story





Write a letter to the Editor





Printer-friendly version











Reporters on

the Job:

Robert Marquand gives you the story behind the story.









monitortalk:

Discuss the news from Asia in our

Global Issues forum.









Yet the "center" is just one person – a Chinese Don Quixote named Frank Lu Siqing.

Armed with a cellphone, a pager, and a rare network of some 2,000 mainland sources, Mr. Lu works 14- hour days, tilting at the windmills of Chinese state security and disseminating news that does not appear in China's state-controlled media.

What's remarkable given his subject, supporters say, is that Lu is practically the only person doing such work.

So effective has China been at intimidating and shutting off any investigation or criticism of its internal behavior that at the annual UN human-rights body in Geneva last week – no country sponsored a critique of China. (The US has regularly done so, but was voted off the 53-member commission last year.)

Conduits of information out of China on prisoners of conscience or dissenters have dried up, leaving mainly second- or third-hand networks of academics and exiles.

"Practically no one is left," says one American source. "They are either retired or in prison."

"In China, the scale of abuses is very large. What we know is the tip of the iceberg," says Robin Munro, a veteran British-based human-rights expert. "In most parts of the world, human-rights awareness comes from the NGO community, people plugged into activist circles. In China, since 1949, no groups have been allowed in. A human rights monitoring effort in China invariably means arrest. What allows Lu to exist is his base in Hong Kong, and his sources."

CHINA watchers say his sources – who report on news that is omitted or not considered for official media – give Lu's operation its edge. For example, China to this day has not reported on nearly two months of protests – both in the north and the south – of laid off workers seeking pensions and back pay.

Until last year, Lu ran his entire operation out of a single crowded room in a Hong Kong walk-up. Since 1996, he has single-handedly put out some 2,500 reports on cases of abuse – twice as many as the three major China human-rights watch groups combined.

Lu was born in Hunan Province, in central China. But he says his parents left him when he was two months old. They were forced to participate in the Cultural Revolution, the Mao-dictated project of social engineering to overhaul traditional China. Lu was raised by a family friend, and did not see his parents for nearly 13 years. "This was very painful," he says. "I don't want to talk about it."

But he remembers reading Chinese characters at age 5, considered early. Such reading included the political posters that saturated public spaces during the Mao era. "Even then, I knew it was a lie. Even as a child, you have some judgment, and you see these writings, and you know they aren't true."

At the same time, Lu dreamed of being able to say what he wanted. "I wanted free expression. I was so angry. I felt the lie could not be changed, yet I remained angry at the lie.

Year by year, you think this over..."

Over the years, he has carved out a network of mainlanders willing to call his beeper. Some are remnants of the shattered political dissident movements or families or friends of detainees. Others are mainland Chinese reporters who phone him from public booths, where calls are harder to trace.

"I get a lot of leads on my pager from local journalists in China," says Lu.

"They know the big news, but are frustrated that they can't tell it. Some of the time, they feel guilty and they call."

This week, when China labor camp veteran and whistle blower Harry Wu was denied access to Hong Kong, when American Chinese scholars were detained, when members of the outlawed Falun Gong were sent to prison – Lu sent a fax to media representatives throughout Asia.

Not all see Lu in laudatory terms, however. Some view him as a "one man band." He has been criticized for not sharing sources, for trying to monopolize, and at one point for belittling other groups. Moreover, when Lu first got started in the early 1990s, he was accused of fabricating two reports.

Yet in recent years, his reputation has turned around. He is now known for double-checking facts and hand writing press releases so they can't be forged or duplicated. "I've watched his faxes and reports for many years. What's amazing – and I don't use that word often – is that to my knowledge, I've never seen him proved wrong. Basically, there is everyone else, and there is Frank Lu."

In person Lu is unassuming, matter of fact, and a bit restless. He says he suffers from insomnia and other stress-related conditions. He changes cellphones every month, reports that he is sometimes followed, and worries that authorities in Hong Kong, evermore bending to authorities in Beijing, are looking for excuses to shut him down.

He also says that human-rights work has become extremely difficult. The Chinese economy has been performing well and a new generation of Chinese aren't interested. Funding is also difficult (Lu operates off one main $20,000 grant per year).

"The human rights period in China is slowing down," he says. "It has been forgotten."

To some, the point seems dramatized by the recent absence of criticism in the Geneva forum, an outcome China has long sought.

"Chinese security forces have been effective in rolling up all organized political dissent," says Andrew Nathan of Columbia University in New York. "The last organized movement I know of was the Chinese Democracy Party, all of whose leaders are now in jail. Human rights work on China is a hard slog for all the groups involved."

Beijing officials argue that, gradually, rights are improving in China. They say China has a different concept of human rights, and highlight progress in fundamental areas, like feeding and clothing their enormous population.

"China seeks mutual equality and respect [on the question of human rights]," said foreign media spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue. "China wishes to develop a common consensus and cooperation."

What Lu and others now focus on are crackdowns on underground churches, on spiritual movements like the Falun Gong inside China (itself, largely shut down), and the recent protests of xiagang, or laid off workers. Last month in Liaoning province, coal, steel, and petrochemical workers protested about what they say are inadequate pensions.

When asked why so many of his sources will talk with him, Lu says he adopts a very simple approach. When Lu calls a police station or the courts, or local witnesses, he doesn't say he is a human rights monitor. "They would just hang up." Instead, he says, he operates on the assumption that people want to tell the truth. "I eventually say, 'I just want to know the truth,' and people respond."

Gee, nice long spam.....but you still didn't address my quesion: Why do you ignore the abuses in your own back yard and rail at those in another country? This belies a political agenda that has nothing to do with feigned concern for Chinese workers....



Where's Clinton on Slave Labor Here at Home?

By Robert Scheer

Published August 11, 1995 in the Los Angeles Times



President Clinton goes on about prison labor in China but has yet to say a word about slave labor in El Monte. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno is immorally silent on the failure of the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles, who reports to her, to lift a finger to protect Thai women forced to work 18 hours a day "or until they drop," seven days a week.



I am not referring to April, 1992, when the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles first learned that slave labor was being conducted in El Monte, 15 miles east of downtown L.A., and closed the case that July along with other investigations of peonage. That crime can be traced to Bush appointees.



But there is a nine-page record in the possession of the local U.S. Attorney that also details criminal indifference on the watch of this Administration. On May 24 of this year, an INS agent spoke to the attorney for a woman who escaped from the garment factory/concentration camp in El Monte, where she had been imprisoned for four years. Three years after claiming they could not get a federal warrant based on an anonymous tip, the INS suddenly had an eyewitness to slavery at the location. And she was willing to testify.



The escapee detailed how a smuggling ring operated within Thailand to recruit their human crop and transport them to the factory prison complex in the United States. The affidavit compiled by the INS is nauseatingly detailed:



"Female Thai informant stated that . . . on most days they were forced to work about 16 hours or until they dropped . . . . She stated that the employers frequently threatened them that if they escaped their families in Thailand would be subjected to violent reprisals . . . that anyone leaving the townhouses unsupervised -- even to just walk inside the compound -- were harshly scolded. She stated that the employers often warned them that if they escaped . . . they would be vulnerable to being raped. She stated that the employees are totally cut off from outside contact . . . that she is aware of about nine who have escaped but who are too afraid of reprisals against their families in Thailand to come forward."



The informant said that the bosses of the operation are "very well connected" in Thailand, "and as a result could carry out violent reprisals with impunity.



The informant stated that even the local U.S. Thai newspapers would not dare expose the slave operation when she informed them of it."



Despite these expressed fears, the escapee met on May 30 with an INS agent and took him to the complex on Santa Anita Boulevard in El Monte. She observed that: "Since her escape, a guard had been posted in the driveway of the compound facing the seven townhouse units . . . the perimeter wall has been both heightened by corrugated steel panels and also topped by rolls or razor wire . . . the rear windows of the townhouse units serving as work shops and employee quarters have been closed/paneled with wood three-fourths of the way to the tops of each window."



The slave labor went on round the clock:



"After dark lights were on in all townhouse units . . . the garage doors on the five townhouse ID'd as quarters/production units were partially opened about one foot at the bottom and fluorescent lights were on in each . . . . The suspected factory appeared by the lights inside to be in production after normal business hours until I terminated surveillance at 2200 (10 p.m.)"



Stop and listen. Two years at a sewing machine for 16 hours a day, seven days a week for $200 a month making garments that fashionable people wear. If she said no, they broke her bones. The Constitution forbids slavery, and she had been a slave. What prevented the U.S. Attorney from asking for a search warrant?



Nothing would have been done about this situation had California Labor Commissioner Victoria Bradshaw, a Wilson appointee, not received a tip and asked the INS to join in the raid. INS Acting District Director Donald Looney wrote a letter Aug. 1 instructing her to wait. There had been enough waiting.



We're talking slavery here, right? How dare the President complain about human rights violations anywhere in the world when his own agents don't give a damn? Are our standards lower than China's?



And how dare Janet Reno's INS now keep these exploited young Thai workers imprisoned in orange uniforms, taking them in shackles from where they are being incarcerated on Terminal Island to the federal building in Los Angeles for interviews? Haven't they suffered enough at the hands of the federal government?

(Washington, D.C.) -- During the Senate's historic debate over granting China permanent most-favored-nation trading privileges (PNTR), U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone today urged his colleagues to support his amendment on prison labor; a measure that addresses the issue of Chinese exports to the United States of goods made by forced labor. The Wellstone amendment would have delayed PNTR for China (S. 4444) until President Clinton certifies that China is in fact complying with existing agreements between the two countries which prohibit the import and export of goods made by prison labor. Wellstone argued that China's continued extensive use of prison labor was an important issue that carries implications both for U.S. trade agreements with China and for human rights in China. The measure unfortunately was defeated 68-29.



"Year after year, we are importing products made with forced prison labor from China. This amendment is in no way an exercise in China-bashing. We are merely insisting that China stop treating the bilateral trade agreements it has signed with us concerning prison labor exports as mere ‘scraps of paper.' What does my amendment ask for? It asks simply that PNTR be denied until President Clinton can certify that China is honoring agreements it has repeatedly violated in the past, signed agreements they are violating now. We already have these trade agreements with China, and they've not abided by them. We say in this amendment ‘We call on you to live up to your agreements before we automatically extend permanent normal trade relations.' What is unreasonable about that?" Wellstone said.

i know that its way back at the begining of the post, but the texan mentioned something about right wingers fighting for libert and freedom?

is this true? are things better in panama now than they were before the 1989 war? i mean, i know they are for a few bankers and businessmen (mostly u.s.), but what about average peeps? or is that just the capitolist system "working?" are they more free? is thier more liberty? or how about chile? peru? and on and on...

oh, wait! how about iran from 1954-1978? how free were they? they may have been a little better off than under the iatohlla, but not then before the shaw. and, left to thier own systems, they hae gradually embraced liberty and freedoms more and more.

if you really want us to belive these missions are for freedom and liberty then tell me, who's going to controll iraq's oil fields when we rebuild thier new "democracy?" are we going to leave control of iraqi oil to iraqi people? or wil this be freedom with exceptions?

and as to the china thing... a seamstress in america has the right to organize to demand her fair share. its the reason my sister didnt have to work a loom when she was six. workers can fight unfairness (read:the bosses) head on. or, yes, quit and search a better job. under our thumb, even that choice is unrealistic (im not sure about china cuz i never been there) with disney workers in bangladesh, at least according to the workes that visted the southland last month. you shuld have seen tham and heard thier stories, texan. in fact, even the ocregister covered thier visit. very inspiring. unchecked, unregulated capitolism is probably the only thing that could help them in thier plight, right?

The El Monte sweat shop doesn't concern me. . . its been closed and the bad guys convicted. . .

After the August 2 raid, eight of the immediate operators of the slave sweatshop were taken into federal custody, charged with involuntary servitude, kidnapping, conspiracy, smuggling, and harboring of the Thai workers. In February 1996, they pled guilty to--among other charges--criminal counts of involuntary servitude and conspiracy. The courageous testimony of the Thai workers made this criminal case possible, but their legal struggle has not ended there. As heinous as the conduct of the sweatshop operators was, it represents only the outward continuum of abuse in the garment industry. The true culprits responsible for slave labor in California are the retailers and manufacturers.

Gee, nice short spam.....but you still didn't address my quesion: Why do you ignore the abuses in your own back yard and rail at those in another country?

t-mex said:

--------------------------------------

If you substituted "mindlessly" with "happily" in your paragraph above, I would be in complete agreement.

----------------------------------------

We get it, the Left thinks they know better than the rest of us. . . and that they should therefore make decisions for us. Sorry if we bristle at that concept, master.

----------------------------------------------

Denial is not the name of a river in Egypt, my friend. Trying to piegonhole me as the "left" does nothing to support your "superior morality," or refute the clarity of my view. You are the "rest of us?" And you know better, you are implying? I'm not making assumptions: your ideas are old, and fatally flawed, due to their being based on your fossilized ego. it is perfectly clear that you are involved in a large justification of your selfish motives, and have nothing to offer other than hackneyed phrases.

-------------------------------------------------------

And your history is a little off:

"When did you last get your info on China? As they continue their long march to the market economy, the amount of people in dire straits has increased. "

Some 20 million Chinese died during the "Great Leap Forward", perhaps 10 million in one year alone.

I know its bad manners to remind the Left of the millions of unmarked graves left behind in its wake of good intentions, but facts are facts.

-----------------------------------------------

Unfortunately, my satire seems to have simply passed you by. . .The Chinese are full tilt into the market economy NOW. And their seamstresses are probably doing better than ours. . .As a matter of fact, that job the chinese seamstress has used to be here. Just wait, though, as the "entrepreneurs" will soon move the factory to North China where they can pay lower wages, and so it goes.

You're just like "Bush," another puppet mouthing the phrases of the puppeteer. The puppeteers just keep repeating the same phrases, hoping that by doing so they will create a sort of reality in the minds of their listeners. I quit listening to such drivel eons ago, and thus my words are my own.

Carry on with the show, but methinks your audience is getting smaller.

Point

You think they bust one slave labor ring in El Monte and the problem is licked.....well they just arrested that murder in the Valley so I guess I don't have to worry about THAT crime occurring anymore either...

...god you're such a fuckin' idiot.

China, after having killed some 40 million peasants, now practices slave labor, completely out in the open, legal etc.

In the US, we send a---es like that to prison.

Do I see a difference?

Yes, and apparently that makes me a "f----ing idiot".

...that...and other things too fuckin' numerous to mention...

Nothing to say? Pull out the F bomb.

KPC. Priceless.

....actually, I'm pretty affordable on the installment plan....



...ooops, almost forgot...

...fuck.