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Indybay Feature

Will SF also cede sovereignty to China's police?

by kirk james murphy, m.d.
During the Great Torch March Forward through London, China's secret police assaulted and tackled UK citizens on the streets of London.

Will they be here to assault US citizens and internationals on the streets of SF?

And when they're off duty, will they be doing any organ harvesting?

While the latter seems unlikely even for China, what restraing orders can be obtained to block China's Bocog goon squad from attacking people along the route of the Great Torch March Forward? They are not accredited diplomats - they are merely hired thugs from the Official Organ Harvesters of the 2008 Olympics.

At 12:09 AM PDT on April 7, the interviewer on the BBC "World Today" grilled the UK's Olympic Minister Teresa Jowell (yep, pronounced "jowl") about how it was that foreign secret police were tackling UK citizens on London streets.

She foisted it off on the local authorities.

(Nary a word of whether the UK and US had simply outsourced renditions....)
The London Times asked "Who are the other boys in blue?"

The unanswered question yesterday was: just who were the Chinese minders who formed a protective ring around the torch?

Lodged between the torchbearers and officers from the Metropolitan Police, a group of Chinese officials shadowed the flame along the route.

Wearing blue and white Beijing 2008 tracksuits, the eleven men were officially described as "flame attendants" responsible for the safe passage of the torch on its journey around the world. They ran in symmetry and remained in touch via earpieces.

Organisers said the men were employees of the Beijing Olympic Organising Committee (Bocog). They landed with the flame at Heathrow on Saturday on a chartered Air China flight from St Petersburg and will go on to Paris.

Ministers said that they had no knowledge of their diplomatic status. Bob Broadhurst, the commanding officer for the Met's £1 million security operation, said: "They are from Bocog. What their status beyond that is, I don't know. Their prime role is to look after the torch and keep the flame alive."

He cited the precedent of the Tour de France, which started from London last summer and involved about 80 French police officers on motorcycles managing the peloton and the support vehicles.

And the UK Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/07/olympicgames2008.china3 described the latest UK-China export trade. The UK sent away human rights; China sent them secret police:

Thirty-seven people were arrested and, long before Ellen MacArthur took the flame on its final journey across the Thames, security concerns meant that the runners carrying it were obscured behind a phalanx of police and Chinese security guards provided by Beijing.

Before the torch arrived police circulated among Tibetan demonstrators ordering them to remove T-shirts and confiscating Tibetan flags in an apparent breach of a promise from Met commanders that police would not intervene to prevent embarrassment to Beijing.

Yonten Ngama, a Tibetan who has been resident in the UK for four years, was ordered to remove a T-shirt scrawled with three slogans, 'China Stop the Killing', 'No Torch in Tibet' and 'Talk to the Dalai Lama'. "They didn't tell me why, they just said I couldn't wear it," he said. Police on the ground declined to comment on the reasons for confiscating the T-shirt.
by on how much China's paying.
Maybe they could get a good deal on 'secret renditions' to that privatized, American gulag in Poland, now that they had to send the Afghanis to Guantanamo when word leaked out. The Brits are all-in, as usual...

Rendition to the Chinese might even be a mercy, if some of what they're saying about Abu Ghraib is true. At least the Chinese have the decency just to shoot you in the street and be done with it.
by MichaelSiegel
I am all for a critique of the Olympic games, the related corporate profiteering, even China's impact on human rights in the world. But once we start throwing in comments about Chinese security engaging in "organ harvesting," we are simply being racist and reactionary.

No doubt, China's government is authoritarian and aids and abets all sorts of abuses. I wouldn't be the U.S. government on a higher moral ground, though, especially once you consider the abuses not only of our military, but also of our CIA and our paid military contractors (see: mercenaries) around the world.

Let's keep our critique focused on the bigger picture -- i.e., sovereignty for Tibetans, life for Darfurians, civil liberties for Chinese -- and avoid the jingoism and blind xenophobia that tends to creep into many critiques of China.
by Naaah.
They'll leave that for the... special forces:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/12/warcrimes.kosovo

...and retain some plausible deniability that way:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability
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