WUI (Writing under the influence)

This house is just two blocks down from mine. I don't know people living in this house. The only thing I know is that they are professors at the Pacific University.

I also know they live in a parallel universe.

People at Powerline, on the other hand, recognize the reality:

The United Nations' Committee on Torture has called on the United States to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center. The panel said the U.S. should "cease to detain any person at Guantanamo Bay and close this detention facility, permit access by the detainees to the judicial process or release them as soon as possible."

The U.N. also criticized the practice of sending detainees to countries where torture is practiced, even where those countries have given assurances that terrorists will not be mistreated. Which raises a couple of questions: first, if the U.N. is concerned about the U.S. sending terror suspects to countries like Egypt, Jordan, etc., because their human rights record is so bad, what, if anything, has the U.N. tried to do about it? Has the U.N. taken any meaningful action against those countries, or is it only concerned about mistreatment of prisoners when it can be used as an opportunity to bash the United States?

Second, given that a large proportion of the Guantanamo prisoners come from the very countries the U.N. criticizes us for sending prisoners to, how exactly are we supposed to release them? A few weeks ago, there was publicity about a couple of Chinese prisoners at Guantanamo who were determined to be "innocent" in the sense that they had attended al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan for the purpose of carrying out terrorist acts not against the U.S., but against China. The administration would have been happy to release the two men, but for obvious reasons they didn't want to go to China, and we didn't want to admit them to the U.S. The problem was finally solved when a third party agreed to take them.

This problem would be far more substantial if we were to accede to the U.N.'s demand that all of the Middle Eastern prisoners at Guantanamo be released:

Military officials have said that they are trying to release many of the roughly 490 detainees now being held in Guantanamo. They say that the effort has been slowed, however, by the difficulty in arranging for clear assurances that they will not be abused when they are returned to their country of origin — in many cases, Saudi Arabia or Yemen.

The U.N., of course, isn't doing anything to help solve that problem. Once again, one wonders whether this whole issue means anything to the U.N. other than an opportunity to foment anti-Americanism.

How many more disasters, scandals, raped girls and boys will it take for some university professors to understand what a miserable failure and utterly useless organization the U.N. is?

John at Powerline continues:

As the Iranian crisis deepens, is anyone looking to the U.N. for a solution? I hope not.

This would be a much better UN flag to hang from one's porch. It's based on the IMAO's Top 10 U.N. Slogans shirt.