Two interesting interviews with an American protester who was held for a week by the Chinese government's in case some Western reporters were feeling particularly motivated to do their job and detract from the Olympics' warm totalitarian glow:

Powderly said that prison guards believed — correctly — that he was the man who assembled the laser but not the protest’s organizer. They accused him of trying to “murder China,” he said. “We know that you didn’t murder China, but you made the knife and you’re going to take credit for it — unless you show us the hand,’ they said,” in an apparent bid to learn the leader’s identity, Powderly said. Safely back in his Grand Street apartment, Powderly told The Brooklyn Paper how he was deprived of sleep, water, food and medicine, cuffed into painful positions, and had $2,000 stolen from his bank account — “non-lethal methods of waging war on people” that he considers “just as insidious as waterboarding.” After hours without sleep and threats against their lives and the lives of their loved ones, Powderly and the other Americans began to crack. “That’s when I started to realize that I’m really good at being a douche-baggy art star, but I’m really bad at this secret agent business,” he said.

A few years ago we'd have raised a huge fuss over stifling dissent, abuse of an American citizen (remember the Singapore caning?), etc. Now we're quiet, in no small part because the Chinese tactics described are less than those which our government considers standard operating procedure. This isn't to equate the two governments or deny that China has engaged in worse but … they also think they're protecting their country from outside threats. Once we've allowed torture and murder under that guise, who are we to say that their threats are less real than the minimally supported “threats” our government has claimed were deadly serious in the past?

I'm somewhat curious how many conservatives are conflicted between their desire to raise a fuss in service of the long-standing goal of promoting China as the new Evil Empire and the deep, abiding belief that liberal performance artists could do with a little waterboarding.

Of particular interest in this regard is McCain's latest reversal: now that he's secured the GOP nomination he's less enthusiastic about ordaining torture than he was earlier this year and, quite unusually for a key player, he isn't lying or resorting to euphemism to describe what we've been doing:

During an assessment of the Bush presidency on "Fox News Sunday," McCain discussed the administration's use over "waterboarding," a technique that has been used to interrogate terrorist detainees. "Waterboarding to me is torture, okay? And waterboarding was advocated by the administration, and according to a published report, was used," McCain said. "I obviously don't want to torture any prisoners."