In newly purchased polo shirts and chinos [har har!], the four husky men, members of a restive ethnic minority from western China, might blend in except for their scruffy beards. Smelling hibiscus flowers, luxuriating in the freedom to drift through scenic streets and harbors, they expressed wonder at their good fortune in landing here after a captivity that included more than a year in solitary confinement.

“I went swimming in the ocean for the first time ever yesterday, and it was the happiest day of my life,” said Salahidin Abdulahat, 32.

C’mon, I mean it practically writes itself! Call the film “The Four Uighurs”; Johnny Depp, in scruffy beard, stars as Abdulahat, who winds up working every day in a wetsuit training dolphins to undertake military missions for the Royal Navy from the nearby naval base. His three buddies eventually pool their earnings from work in private gardens and at popsicle-stands to open up their own seaside camping-ground, which they name Camp Delta. Trouble arrives in the form of a restaurant (originally called “Git Ma,” Chinese for “enemy combatant”) started up in the neighborhood by a pair of Cantonese immigrant families. In the end, though, through various hijinks and comic situations everyone learns to live together again in sun-struck island harmony – in fact, Depp even mentors one dolphin with a surprising aptitude for performing point-to-point coastal Chinese take-out deliveries. Take it from there . . .

Maybe you can’t handle writing about an island situation for some reason? Fine, then consider instead the story of another set of Uighurs from Guantánamo, reported on today in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, whom the Obama administration wants to release into yet another sort of strange, paradise-like environment, namely the alpine hills and valleys of Switzerland. This real-life story, alas, comes with no guaranteed happy ending. As Trouw reports, the Swiss are willing enough to accept the former inmates (two of them this time; completely innocent, of course) to try to get back in the good graces of the Obama administration after some prior trouble involving American demands that the Swiss give up their bank-account secrecy. But the Chinese authorities are objecting here, and have warned the Swiss government against taking them. They say that the Uighurs are legitimate terror-suspects after all, and the only place they should go henceforth is back to China for trial.

This scenario could well end up a tragedy, for you can well imagine the “trial” and generally-unpleasant reception the Chinese have prepared for these men. Unfortunately, the recent record of the Swiss of letting themselves be pushed around is not good: there is still an embarrassing dispute ongoing with Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, involving a public apology to Libya by the Swiss president and two Swiss businessmen still held in Tripoli and about to face trial there on trumped-up charges.

                          

Merkel actually was supposed to make this trip back at the very beginning of April, in order to do some coordinated preparation with Obama for that G20 summit in London that you might have heard about back then; they video-conferenced instead. Then, during that brief trip to Europe that Obama made at the beginning of this month – after the speech directed to the Muslim world that he delivered in Cairo – his foray through Germany included not Berlin proper, but just Dresden and Weimar (for visiting the Nazi concentration camp near-by there, Buchenwald), as if he had no reason and/or interest to confer with Merkel. All this has fed speculation in Germany that personal relations between the two heads-of-government are not as warm as might be desired, and indeed the Die Zeit article does carefully parse hints from the statements both made during their joint news-conference in Dresden. (E.g. Obama termed his host-city “very beautiful” – ah! a good sign!) The verdict: the Obama-Merkel relationship “is slowly warming up – even if it now not (yet) reached the stage of intimate friendship.”

It should neither come as any surprise that there is further speculation in the French press that the Obama-Nicolas Sarkozy relationship is not that great either, that Obama even intended in some way to “snub” Sarkozy during that latest European trip when he went to Normandy for the D-Day anniversary celebrations. I’ll spare you any further discussion of that here, other than to remark that that perhaps makes a bit more sense, since it has long been clear that Sarkozy has a high-strung personality which is easier for anyone to dislike.

No Uighurs to Deutschland!

Back to German-American matters, though, and the Die Zeit article does note that the main current issue raising that relationship’s temperature is that of former inmates from Guantánamo Bay, of which the US wants Germany to accept some for resettlement, a request to which Germany has yet to accede. In fact, it states that the US Government previously requested that Germany take the nine Uighurs (those poor souls originally from Western China, who were cleared by US authorities as completely innocent years ago), but the German Interior Minister, Wolfgang Schäuble refused; so the US re-submitted a request that a mere two be accepted, which nonetheless probably is fated to find just as frosty a response.

The sad thing is that this dispute is entirely unnecessary: the Uighurs don’t belong in Germany and probably would not want to go there even if they were permitted to. This we can clearly see from the recent excellent New York Times photo-series about the four who were recently admitted to settle in Bermuda: look, they’re eating ice cream there, for Heaven’s sake, they’re swimming at the beach! OK, yes, Germany also has excellent ice cream (although hardly the same quality of beaches). The serious point here, though, is that Germany has a clear record of hostility to incoming immigrants, particularly to those of non-Western appearance and/or religious beliefs, a record which consists of a steady, general cultural unfriendliness against such outsiders, but which is highlighted by infamous night-time attacks-by-fire by skinheads that occurred in the 1990s against shelters housing foreign asylum-seekers. Other European countries do make plausible targets for such US Government requests, but not Germany, so that whatever negative influence this needless controversy is having on German-American relations is just regrettable.

                          

Great! So does that mean, for example, that the Netherlands will be willing to take in some of the 250-or-so prisoners who remain? You know, probably some of them are actually terroristic nasties, but nasties whom US authorities will nonetheless have problems ever prosecuting because of how some of the evidence against them was gained (i.e. by torture). So while it’s conceivable that about the only thing that can eventually be done is to set them free, quite often their native countries don’t really want to have them back.

Well . . . not so fast. The good Foreign Minister will first need to consult with his colleague, the Justice Minister: “I want to take a look with Hirsch Balin [that's the Dutch Justice Minister] how they can get a trial in accord with our norms and values.”

                          

I like to start with France, a civilization which naturally is the implacable enemy of every true “real American” cultural warrior – oooh la la Gov. Palin!

From Sylvain Cypel, New York correspondent for Le Monde (Guantanamo, financial crisis, Iraq . . .: The dossiers that await the president):

The new president intends, as he has repeated, to take during the first year of his term a series of “spectacular” decisions and initiatives. He should therefore, within the first 100 days after 20 January, give an “address to the Islamic world” designed to improve current relations and to scotch any idea of a “clash of civilizations.” But his decisions will be squeezed in a vise of, on the one side, the impact of the economic crisis and, on the other, the need to put into effect several costly [election] promises, while the American public deficit approaches $1 trillion.

And he adds about Guantanamo (a subject of interest among Europeans, you can be sure, and for quite a while):

Closing Guantanamo poses a logistical problem of unprecedented scope. Whom to set free, whom to keep in detention? Knowing that the material under secret seal held by the prosecution includes tens of thousands of pages, although one suspects that a number of the confessions have been obtained through torture. Where to place the prisoners, and on what basis to judge them equitably?

From Laurent Joffrin of Libération (It’s time):

It’s time, in fact. [Il est temps, en effet.] . . .

It’s time, in fact, to put an end to a brutal, mendacious and dogmatic foreign policy that has dug a ditch between rich and poor nations. It’s time to finish an Iraq war which has resuscitated the specter of colonialism. It’s time to stop a social policy defined by the rich, for the rich. It’s time to claim back from finance the monopoly that it had arrogated to itself on the course of globalization. It’s time to return to the citizens of the United States, through means of their elected representatives, a certain minimum influence on their economic destiny – that is, on their destiny, period. It’s time that America cooperated with the common efforts for safeguarding the planet. It’s time, finally, that the greatest democracy be incarnated not by a senator coming out of a dominating Western conservatism that is sure of itself, but by a man of the new century, of mixed culture, open to differences.

Now to Germany. From Torsten Krauel, Washington correspondent of Die Welt (What’s awaiting the new president):

Today in [US] domestic policy there are three great tasks – the stifling of the financial crisis, the transformation of the welfare state, the general refurbishment of infrastructure including ecological measures. All three areas cost a lot of money. The budget situation after the financial aid [i.e. bailout] package is so dire that the new president will have to decide immediately which of the three tasks will have to be temporarily put off to the side. The struggle about this will mark the first half of 2009. A strong faction of Democrats wishes to immediately address climate change, a just-as-strong Republican faction wants energy-autarky for the US. An even stronger faction from both parties wants to introduce national health insurance, the Democrats somewhat more insistent than the Republicans. And all politicians, Democrats as well as Republicans, want to save the credit and real estate markets right away. It’s this last that will become first priority, at the cost of climate-change and maybe even of the health system.

We can’t neglect Die Zeit, of course. Here is Andrea Böhm (The white-black president, and datelined on 6 November 08 – but then, the Die Zeit paper edition is a weekly):

Now America has its first black president, who in reality is a white-black president. And the world has, at least for a moment, “its” America back: from George W. Bush to Obama, from Saul to Paul, from the war-making superpower to the leader of the ecological transformation. About whether and how Obama will fulfill these enormous expectations, one in the next few months can certainly doubt. Right now, though, the symbolic impact of this victory takes one’s breath away.

Never before has a presidential election had so much to do, in such a dramatic way, with the myth of resurrection – that quintessentially American belief, according to which everyone, even a whole nation, after falling into the bottomless pit, can pull one/itself together and invent one/itself anew. To put it in the prosaic words of American TV comic Sarah Silverman: America has, within one election night, transformed itself from “asshole of the universe” [that's given in the original English] into a land of the politically-enthused with a “world president.” That is the global effect of this electoral victory, that might soon just dissipate – but that goes much deeper in inner-American reality.

And then from Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, their Washington correspondent Reymer Klüver (Arising from ruins):

The election of Barack Obama was for America an act of self-liberation, indeed, of self-cleansing.

Forty-five years after a black preacher spoke on the white marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial of his dream of an America without racial barriers, this land has shown once more that that can come to maturity. It has overcome hundred-year-old prejudices. Forty-five years after Martin Luther King’s great address, the Americans have made a black their president. . . .

All of this gives motivation to the justified hope that he in fact has the capabilities to lead the land in a superior and considered way – other than the case with the president still there in office. That he possesses the capacity and the will to build bridges over the moats that his predecessor wantonly has torn open and which have so deeply divided not only US society but the entire world. That he can restore to a land that in recent years has lost its direction a new confidence in its own capabilities and values.

Now to the Netherlands and Juurd Eijsvoogel (you can tell from that name that we’re not in Germany anymore, no?) of the NRC Handelsblad (America chooses a world-citizen):

After eight years of Bush, in which superpower America first was hit in the heart and then frittered away much regard and authority in the world, American voters have now opened the way for the recovery of their land’s reputation.

Yesterday they not only chose a new president, they also – although they weren’t meaning to – gave a signal to the world. With Barack Obama they have made a world-citizen their leader.

And that did not slip by the world’s attention. Did not Obama himself say, when this summer he addressed a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin, that he was not only “a proud citizen of the United States” but also “a fellow citizen of the world”? That sounded much different from: who isn’t with us, is against us. Not only Americans were yearning for change, after eight years of Bush – a big part of the world was, too.

Now to Denmark: the lead-editorial from Berlingske Tidende is entitled A victory for the USA:

It’s almost too banal to say that it was a landslide victory. It was a victory that was national and that far exceeded what is normal for a presidential election – a land divided in two. . . .

The war against terror has cost much in the way of both human and economic resources. The fight has also split the rest of the world. The USA is far from alone in this fight. But the Americans have also gained a long series of new enemies, which it will cost just as many resources to fight in the future. Also, the lands allied with the USA, which normally could be counted upon to be among the USA’s friends, have begun to hesitate before the war against terror. Not because they don’t believe in it, but because the present president George W. Bush no longer has much to offer. Obama will be able to put things in the right direction again. He represents more than any other president in recent times a unified USA. This imposes both national and international obligations. The expectations for him are therefore sky-high.

By the way, you can see here an embedded interview with Berlingske’s US correspondent, about how all this US election stuff has been playing in Denmark. Of course, the actual name Berlingske Tidende is no where to be seen on the post, and is only heard out of the mouth of the Danish reporter, Karl Erik Stougaard, because such a name as that is too confusing for American ears to be captured and accurately transcribed.

Then we head across a chilly November’s Copenhagen to the edge of the Rådhusplads and the daily newspaper Politiken; foreign editor Michael Jariner’s analysis is entitled America writes history:

The election of Barack Obama does not mean that there is no longer a division between black and white, for the poverty and criminality statistics show with all clarity that there is.

But Americans have moved closer to the realization of that dream that the black civil rights activist Martin Luther King formulated 45 years ago in his famous I have a dream speech. . . .

For the night’s voting [Copenhagen time] blacks and Latinos put themselves together as a voting-group that can decide elections, and this will unavoidably rub off on the composition of the many thousand of political and administrative positions which now must be filled. It potentially has wide-ranging implications for the whole of American society.

And then to Poland, to the “election newspaper,” of course, Gazeta Wyborcza. Witold Gadomski demands that Obama must remember his promises:

The president-elect has carefully avoided answering questions about who will finance all these gifts [this refers to the many programs involving new spending cited in the previous paragraph that Gadomski claims Obama promised during his campaign - national health insurance, aid to defaulting homeowners, etc.]. To be sure, he has announced a rise in taxes, but only for the 5% best-paid Americans. He also has not occupied himself with those problems whose solution will be neither easy not pleasant for Americans – the hole in public finances and the galloping indebtedness of America, the wasteful administration of public institutions established in the last half-century for addressing the standard of living of the poorest Americans, such as Medicare, Medicaid and the “sponsored enterprises” to assist housing construction.

By the way, that Gazeta article also has a great picture of Obama at his local Chicago polling-place, looking straight at the camera in a determined, even defiant, manner and holding up his ballot. The picture is credited to Reuters, but I hadn’t seen it anywhere else; you should click through to check it out, even if all those funny letters of the Polish language somehow intimidate you.

That’s about all I can do for now – I know, I neglected Belgium, the Czech Republic, Uncle Tom Dooley, and some other countries as well, but that’s just the way it is. By the way, comments are certainly welcome via e-mail on this Andrew Sullivan format: to a great degree, I feel, it’s rather superficial, since almost all of the articles from which I took these extracts had other sections that deserved mention too. Plus, I generally like to think that some accompanying analysis from yours truly is in order – for instance, did you catch that one citation where it was clear that the correspondent didn’t know what he was talking about regarding American politics? In a nutshell – and as all long-standing €S followers (if there are any – Hi Mom!) already know – I like to go mostly with deeper but narrower coverage, rather than this more-extensive but shallower reporting.

Of course, ideally I would go with extensive and deep coverage, but certain restrictions of time, space, and finance preclude that for now. On this same subject, let me voice my suspicion that we actually have Andrew Sullivan’s editorial assisant (a certain Patrick Appel) to thank for the Election Reax post and that extract-anthology “Andrew Sullivan blog-post format” generally. I’m afraid we can’t afford editorial assistants here at EuroSavant.

                          

The rest of the brief article has mostly to do with various other pronouncements from Rester. The very next paragraph is great: Rester complains that his profession has gained a bad reputation due to all the reports about the CIA mistreating detainees in various secret prisons. “His work is little appreciated by the public and that sticks in Rester’s craw.”

Of course, as the article goes on to note, by now the CIA has admitted that it has subject detainees to waterboarding in the past. But Rester wants to make it clear that at Gitmo there have only been two cases of inmates being harshly treated – and, he adds, that was when the infamous prison-camp had only just been opened. I guess they were still trying to get their bearings then about how they were supposed to interact will all these characters in the bright-orange jump-suits that the military airplanes were delivering to them.

The article does mention one instance of “success” derived from what we are to believe is Gitmo’s standard “ask-and-ye-shall-receive approach,” namely a map of the Tora Bora region in eastern Afghanistan that inmates were persuaded to draw and which was useful to the American forces there. However, it does not name the reason why this entire subject of “We just ask them normal questions – honest!” has come up now, which is of course that the Bush administration has now identified six such inmates that it wants to try – using those “military commissions” – and to execute for allegedly complicity in the September 11 attacks. So the government is now pushing hard the idea that it used normal non-coercive (add “humane” and/or “legal” here to taste) questioning techniques – either exclusively or else at least in some strange parallel way to the “harsher” techniques.

Not that that additional explanation would do anything to alter the impression any literate Flemish-Belgian would take from this piece: Why did they have to torture them in the first place if they didn’t have to go that to get their information?! In all, this is a short + sweet, remarkable piece: it just lays out the facts, ma’am, and Rester’s various opinions and explanations, adding no opinions from the actual writer. None are needed for the point to be clear.

                          

Interestingly, though, the somewhat more-confrontational stance that the Danish prime minister supposedly is ready to take into the White House in a few weeks’ time was not unveiled by Rasmussen himself, but rather by his foreign minister, Per Stig Møller. What’s more, it wasn’t revealed in a formal government statement, but rather at “question time” in the Folketing, as Politiken reports (Denmark Widens Criticism of USA). The prime minister would not content himself with merely criticizing American treatment of Iraqi prisoners in the Oval Office, Møller claimed. He would also have remarks to make about whether the United Nation’s (anti-)torture convention and other international accords are being observed at Guantánamo and at the American-controlled airbase at Bagram in Afghanistan, as well as about America’s refusal to place its nationals under the jurisdication of the International Criminal Court.

PM: MOUSE OR LION?

Now, that’s the foreign minister speaking, in the parliament. Then again, it’s only the foreign minister; remarks from the prime minister from earlier that day, also reported in Politiken’s article, are considerably less belligerent. “There are a thousand things one can talk about at all possible meetings. And I have not set the agenda for what I want to speak with the President about,” prime minister Rasmussen is quoted as saying.

Then again, the Berlingske Tidende, another leading Danish daily, has another report, dated Tuesday (Fogh Demands the Highest Standard for Prisoner Treatment in Iraq), that has the prime minister coming out swinging. He intends to tell Bush that Denmark considers the cases of prisoner abuse “intolerable,” and indeed that his country “demands” (the verb here is forlange, Danish fans) that the US adhere to “the highest possible standard” in its prisoner treatment. Berlingske Tidende doesn’t reveal directly in what forum the prime minister made these remarks, but it must have been in his regular Tuesday press conference, since the paper does point out how, in his press conference of Tuesday last week – i.e. as the prisoner treatment scandal was just breaking out – the prime minister showed no inclination to make any demands during his Washington visit.

It’s true that, at one level, this is all somewhat laughable – little Denmark making demands, the mouse that roars. For heaven’s sake, the Bush administration seems oblivious even to objections and demands from Congress in this prisoner abuse matter. But of course Denmark has more powerful friends, or more precisely is a member of a more power association; and indeed both the first Politiken article and this other article in Berlingske Tidende report how foreign minister Møller is also determined to raise the matter of America’s recent behavior when it comes to international conventions at the scheduled EU foreign ministers’ meeting next Monday.

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

To the commentary newspaper Information, it’s all a bit too late (in The Good Against the Evil). The article begins with a timely quote from Winston Churchill (translated here back from the Danish): “A state’s right to throw a man in prison without formulating an accusation to the court . . . is most disgusting, and such a way of proceeding is the foundation stone of every form of totalitarian regime, Nazi or communist.” Anders Fogh Rasmussen might have finally screwed his courage up to confront President Bush and demand “the highest possible standard” of treatment for prisoners, but it’s unlikely the American chief executive will be quaking in his boots much over that. In any case, the problem goes way back – to the “democratic exceptions” deemed essential after the September 11 attacks to win the “war on terrorism.” First there was the “Patriot Act,” which made it legal to hold thousands without charge, on suspicion of terrorism. Then came the refusal to abide by the Geneva Convention in Afghanistan, instead coming up with the concept of “illegal combatants,” who could be whisked off to the new detention center at Guantánamo Bay, where they would have no rights at all. “The USA let it be known that, when Good fought against Evil, one had to put the rule of law and international rules partially or wholly aside.” The basis was set for a slide into Churchill’s totalitarian regime.

Where were Danish objections when all that was happening? Information asks. Also, for all his indignation, Prime Minister Rasmussen also seems to accept the American administration’s argument that the prisoner abuse was merely the work of a few misguided guards, a few bad apples. But that seems less and less likely to actually be the case, the paper points out, as is to be seen, for example, in the Pentagon manual detailing 20 approved torture methods for use at Guantánamo.

The prime minister, Information finds, should save his breath during his White House visit. He has come around too late to what has really been going on; he has no basis to complain, since he himself, and by implication his government, were complicit by their silence in the misdeeds that only now are coming to light.