Twenty years in China

Holy shit, I thought David Hicks had it bad, but check out this story about two CIA agents whose mission went horribly wrong, and they ended up detained for twenty years.

There may be some among us who can imagine 20 days in captivity; perhaps a fraction of those can imagine a full year deprived of liberty and most human contact. But 20 years? Downey and Fecteau have consistently sought to downplay their period of imprisonment; and neither has done what arguably too many former CIA officers do these days with far less justification: write a book. Downey has said that such a book would contain “500 blank pages,” and Fecteau says the whole experience could be summed up by the word “boring.”

Wow. I cannot imagine what these guys went through, and the fact they seemed to come out of it relatively sane and happy is amazing.

However, as horrible as this is, there were two things that leapt out at me.

a) There are many people in prisons in Australia and heaps in the US that will be there for twenty years or more. Obviously, these conditions are much better than the Chinese prisons, but I have no doubt they are in many ways similar, and in some ways probably worse.

In both cases, twenty years is an incredibly long time for 'rehabilitation'. And in both cases it is sometimes not long enough. I guess the moral of this point is that no one should be locked up for twenty years, and that time has a questionable relationship to changing a person's thoughts and personality.

b) As horrible as what these guys went through, the torture they endured is nothing compared to what the United States has done to the people in Guantanamo Bay. When Bush delved and Mao span, who then was the gentleman, eh?