Glass Houses

by digby

Am I the only one who finds it a little bit laughable that in response to the visit with Castro by the CBC members, Republicans are demanding (pdf) that prisoners in Cuba be released before the US normalizes relations?

Here's Congressman Chris Smith's heartfelt plea earlier today, in which he castigates the congressmen and women for failing to visit Cuba's political prisoners:

Long ago I learned that when the US government embraces and coddled dictators and turns its back on political prisoners, the jailers taunt the prisoners with this. They tell them -- "you are forgotten, no one knows you are here! No one is trying to help you." The beatings actually increase.

"You are forgotten and abandoned" is a terrible thing to hear --- to be taunted with --- when you are in Combinado e Este prison, eating worm infested rice in a cell the size of a closet, standing in open sewage, trying to keep up your spirits to survive another day of punches and beatings. But I am afraid the prisoners are hearing just that after the congressional visit that ended this week.

I couldn't agree more. But it's a bit unseemly to make that argument when Americans are holding their own prisoners in Cuba, some of whom have tried to kill themselves out of despair that they will never even be given a trial or know if they will see the outside world again. I assume they don't have worms in their rice, but they have, by all accounts suffered quite a few beatings and worse. And many of them are innocent.

I think American congressmen who to Cuba probably need to be a little bit circumspect about lecturing anyone about wrongfully imprisoning anyone. Shamefully, the US doesn't exactly have a lot of credibility on this issue.

I should note that Secretary of State Clinton took quite a bit of heat for moving human rights to the back burner when she was in China. I agree that it's a terrible thing to do, but she can't credibly do anything else as long as we are running prisons like Guantanamo and Bagram and covering up the extent of the torture and kidnapping that was done during the Bush administration.

Until the US cleans its own dirty laundry, it's hardly in a position to go around telling other people how to behave. That's why it is so vital that President Obama fix this mess and quickly. Until he does it, his foreign policy will be hamstrung and eventually will be seen to be hypocritical and dishonest. His recent trip showed that the world wants to give him a chance and see him as a positive change from George W. Bush. But I'm not sure that's going to last long if his government has to soft-peddle human rights and international law --- or sound like these Republican dolts did today. If you take away moral authority all that's left is brute force. And that's the Cheney Gang's foreign policy.