{"id":10857,"date":"2012-05-08T07:05:39","date_gmt":"2012-05-08T12:05:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=10857"},"modified":"2012-05-08T07:08:25","modified_gmt":"2012-05-08T12:08:25","slug":"chen-guangchengs-blind-injustice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2012\/05\/08\/chen-guangchengs-blind-injustice\/","title":{"rendered":"Chen Guangcheng’s Blind Injustice"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Daily Beast<\/em> article Chen Guangcheng’s Blind Injustice<\/strong><\/a> provides more details about the controversy possibly being manufactured by the US press as discussed in my previous post Lukewarm US Support of Chinese Dissident \u2013 My Donkey<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

In The Daily Beast<\/em> article, one of the paragraph that touches on the issue states:<\/p>\n

After six intense days of negotiations, a deal was struck. Chen and his family would stay in China but relocate to the coastal city of Tianjin, where he could study law\u2014something I knew he\u2019d always dreamed of\u2014and authorities would leave him alone. Chen emerged from the embassy, smiling, in a wheelchair. Photographers captured him hugging burly U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and holding hands with Ambassador Gary Locke. Clinton, who had just arrived in Beijing for the talks, praised the deal as one reflecting \u201chis choices and our values.\u201d Later, though, after things started to unravel, Chen told me that he \u201cfelt pressured to leave the embassy.\u201d (A senior U.S. official denied that any pressure had been exerted and said Americans had begun to make contingencies for a \u201clong-term occupancy,\u201d discussing precedents such as the case of Hungarian Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, a political prisoner during the Stalinist era who sought and was granted asylum in the U.S. Embassy in Budapest and lived there for 15 years.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You might interpret this paragraph as giving some support to the attitude taken by The Boston Globe<\/em>.\u00a0 At least The Daily Beast<\/em> article gives you some context as to what the US officials are saying that might give you pause in\u00a0 accepting the Globe’s take.\u00a0 Still the article uses the snippet of a quote \u201cfelt pressured to leave the embassy\u201d without explicitly stating where Chen felt the pressure was coming from.\u00a0 Why can’t anybody specifically say that Chen felt pressured by US officials, if, in fact, that is what he thought?<\/p>\n

Are people reporting this story using carefully selected words from conversations with Chen in order to give us a clear picture of the subtle meaning, or are they using these carefully chosen words to obscure the meaning?\u00a0 I do not purport to know the answer to this question, yet.\u00a0 We may never know the truth beyond a reasonable doubt.<\/p>\n

Soon the doubt will fade in people’s minds, and they will begin to think that they know for sure what happened.\u00a0 This brings me back to one of my favorite quotes<\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n

Mark Twain
\n\u201cIt ain\u2019t what you don\u2019t know that gets you into trouble. It\u2019s what you know for sure that just ain\u2019t so.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Daily Beast article Chen Guangcheng’s Blind Injustice provides more details about the controversy possibly being manufactured by the US press as discussed in my previous post Lukewarm US Support of Chinese Dissident \u2013 My Donkey. In The Daily Beast article, one of the paragraph that touches on the issue states: After six intense days […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-10857","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10857"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10859,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10857\/revisions\/10859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}