U.S. to block cotton, tomato product imports from Xinjiang over forced labor
reuters.com
reuters.com
Same with cotton. If this impacts clothes, that could be significant, but I don't think of China as a big textiles player, and the US still produces a lot of cotton, it just doesn't weave it or make clothes from it.
Xinjiang produces 20% of the world's cotton. The reality is, most farmers in Xinjiang are independent entities. They are the little guys. They grow cotton or any other produces on their land, and sell the produces to distributors. Many of these farmers are minority ethnicity, Uighur included, but there are others as well. These people lived in villages and in the country side for generations. Farming and the "primary" sector of the economy is how they make a living for generations. They are the low to middle income bracket of the society. They depend on agriculture to raise families, provide food on the table, raise children, and take care of the elderly in the family. A blanket ban of all cotton produced in this region will devastate the life of these people. Think about it from the perspective of these people. They grew cotton on their farm, and one day they are told "The U.S. stops buying your product because they want to protect you from forced labor", and because of that, you will be out of work. The farmer sits there and think "Wait, I am farming because I need money to feed my families". This ban sounds like its standing with the Uighur people, but in reality, it hurts them the most. Rights to live, rights to livelihood, rights to income and bringing food to the table is also human rights.
Target companies or organizations that actually committed forced labor and present concrete evidence. Maybe require a document of the name of the farmer, require disclosure and certifications of the practices of the producers. There are many ways this could be done to both protect legitimate producers, farmers, and rule out the bad actors. Or at least act like you are trying. A blanket ban blew the covers off of the PR statement this is about protecting human rights and stand with the people. Instead, the actual intent is to suppress the Chinese economy, and prevent the people living there from getting richer and achieve a better quality of life. Its sad that there are people in the world who don't really care about other people's quality of life. They can enjoy themselves a good paying job, nice cloths, good cars etc. While for other people, farming, doing hard, manual and labor intensive work on the farm is all they can ever dream of. And what little they have now will be "taken" away from them.
Sanctions de-fund an entire export system. Obviously this includes both the workers as well as the higher layers of the industry. If that specific industry is misbehaving according to some standard, it can elevate voices within that industry that can see to that change.
It only works if the change desired is less costly that business profits lost (to the decision makers). Hopefully someone is doing that calculation in DC. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't because they simply find a different buyer, and other times it's not even meant to work - it's just a virtue signal and hand out to domestic producers.
...
>In March, U.S. lawmakers proposed legislation that would effectively assume that all goods produced in Xinjiang are made with forced labor and would require certification that they are not.
These sanctions are an of extension XPCC / bingtuan sanctions from a few weeks ago. The organizations run XJ agriculture. Ultimately they're kind whatever, XJ tomatoes are <1B export and will be redirected for internal consumption. 40-50B of cotton will be washed through SEA producers. In terms of human rights, the reality is the ag workers particularly Uyghurs are going to suffer more after XPCC sanctions - primarily because region can't import superior US agricultural equipment. So they'll just end up working the people harder. Obviously US equipment producers will also lose out. Decouple is expensive, SMIC lose 4B, PSI loses 100B. The question is whether these moves are smart and within stated interests. Regardless, hope the bar for more significant escalation, particular military ones, is based on more conclusive findings, but you never know with election politics.
Could you tell more about "superior agricultural equipment"? I have only heard about tractors with DRM, but I assume, that you meant something else.
On DRM note, wonder if they're going to be forced to disable existing machines in the region. That would be interesting. I think half of the cotton production occurs in other provinces, so there's a loophole for more parts and supplies if hacktivists can overcome geo locks or other restrictions. Maybe John Deere will be incentivized to sell DRM free systems.
How about even stronger sanctions?
I guess the US is now so dependent on China that they can't?
Another reason this current administration's hands are tied because it's an election year. And wall street has already raised more money for democrats this past few months than republicans, because of the anti-China stance.
Everything they’ve done since then is a fraction of the massive gift they gave the Chinese.
Heck, even the Chinese know what a joke this administration is which is why they basically captured Hong Kong, are trying to destroy Vietnam, extracting as much from Australia and India as they can in the past year while the going is good with the administration.
Also, comparing to Germany, a country with a population less than 20% of the US’s which has basically no standing army by design, and hosts massive American bases within it is a complete non sequitur.
Why don’t you compare to India, for example, which within weeks of a small border skirmish pretty much eliminated the entirety of Chinese digital companies from the country. Setting aside the wisdom of that decision, if you’re just comparing the actions taken by administrations, India has done far more in far less time that has been far more effective than throwing random tantrums after Xi refused to bribe your President enough.
Companies are stepping over each other to move factories out of China. Just check chinalawblog. Any sane COO is de-risking right now. And what about Pompeo's speech? tariffs? banning wechat? supporting Taiwan? There's an endless list of this administration actions trying to curtail China.
> dropping TPP.
TPP was still an IF still when 2017 rolled around.
> Chinese know what a joke this administration is which is why they basically captured Hong Kong, are trying to destroy Vietnam, extracting as much from Australia and India
China is making stupid mistakes after mistakes. It managed to piss off almost every surrounding neighbors: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, India, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, etc. It is basically at war with India right now. And US, Canada, UK, France, and some EU countries are in conflict with China as well. Just recently, even Germany, one of its last ally in Europe has condemned China publically for the czech republic situation
China is so knee deep in trouble, with internal top leadership conflict, coronavirus, job losses, suffering trade, flooding, food shortage, that it has no choice but to establish internal "order" with inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Tibet. But it is messing up there too.
> Also, comparing to Germany, a country with a population less than 20% of the US
That's just dishonest hand waving. Everyone knows Germany leads the EU.
> Why don’t you compare to India
China literally killed Indian soldiers - an act of war. There's no comparison here. And again, this is election year. This US administration cannot piss off every US companies by an absolute economic sanction on China.
Source? My understanding is Xi has pretty effectively consolidated power, and such internal struggles would be pretty opaque to everyone who doesn't have access to a well-connected CCP member.
It does look like they're expecting a period of increased isolation in the future though: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/07/business/china-xi-economy...
Tons of companies have had that same dream in the last 40 years, before China gets old in 2050, before China became nationalist in 2018. Companies like KFC, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Samsung, Nintendo, Home Depot, Mattel, Ebay.
According to Bolton’s book, when Trump met Xi he praised the Chinese treatment of Uighurs, and begged Xi for help (to borrow Trump’s favorite description, “he begged him like a dog”).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-asked-chinas-x...
This goes along with Trump’s at-least-monthly private phone calls and meetings with Putin where he gets his next instructions, his (as he personally described them) “love letters” to and from Kim Jong Un, his praise for Balsonaro, Erdogan, Orbán, Duda, Prince Salman, Netanyahu, and so on.
The idea that the administration wants to stick it to the Chinese as a way to defend human rights and democracy is ludicrous on its face.
All major candidates of the 2016 election intended to end TPP, so it was dead either way. Only Obama sought to pursue it. To act like it wasn't dead is misinformation
I went back and read Clinton's position, which was that the concept of the US pivoting to the Pacific Rim vis a vis trade was critical but that TPP lacked some additional measures she wanted (ex. stronger measures against currency manipulation).
I don't think Trump ever articulated a cogent policy position on TPP at all. He did have plenty of his usual free association ranting, though, like:
> "And the Obama Trans-Pacific Partnership and fast track are a bad, bad deal for American businesses, for workers, for taxpayers. It’s a huge set of handouts for a few insiders that don’t even care about our great, great America."
> Then, last fall, once the 12 participating nations announced they had finalized the text after years of negotiations, Clinton said she opposes it -- citing its lack of a crackdown on currency manipulation and provisions to extend pharmaceutical drug companies' patent protections in poorer countries.
And in here words during a debate:
> "I did say, when I was secretary of state, three years ago, that I hoped it would be the gold standard," Clinton said at an October debate with Sanders. "It was just finally negotiated last week, and in looking at it, it didn't meet my standards. My standards for more new, good jobs for Americans, for raising wages for Americans. And I want to make sure that I can look into the eyes of any middle-class American and say, 'This will help raise your wages.' And I concluded I could not."
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/27/politics/tpp-what-you-need-to...
Do you really think 5,600 pages of fresh red tape would have been beneficial long term for the US? The TPP was essentially locking the US into an agreement where a bunch of smaller countries could mooch off of the US economy of scale.
The treaty would have tended to favor larger US corporations and not US people (because that's what US "IP" laws do), but it wouldn't have been bad for the US economy.
Also, I don't think globalization is a good thing. I agree it would be good for the US economy short term, but really would just lead to turning the world into the equivalent of this pic: https://www.alamy.com/stock-image-american-culture-fast-food...
[1] - https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison
That's not why and you (probably) know it. In the off chance you don't: anti-China sentiment is popular among both parties. Pelosi has been chastising Trump publicly for delaying Chinese sanctions.
https://www.axios.com/pelosi-trump-china-uighur-sanctions-be...
For economic sanctions to have their intended effect you need participation from a lot of countries so this doesn't feel appropriate to dismiss as a whataboutism
Anything that hurts China and also the US while also ignoring Russia’s actions is, again knowingly or not, playing the exact hand they’d prefer the US to play.
While Chinese sanctions could be applied easier when partnerships are strong. It's hard to go "all-in" while the be administration is dropping a lot of agreements, just because they were made by the previous president.
Countries like China and Russia are trying to make the most advantage now they can.
I rarely wish I was American, but this strong stance against the CCP and it's horrific cruelties is one of those times I stand with America.
https://defensepoliticsasia.com/why-china-import-soybeans-fr...
But agreed, I hope to see stronger sanctions soon.
But even if it's true that China's just bullied a bunch of countries into being complicit, their complicity still does make a push for sanctions harder.
Infamous whistleblowers of the U.S. Government/Washington regularly get airtime. When was the last time you heard of a Snowden/Manning from the CCP?
> I’m going to tell you a secret
It is not a secret, and people working in US government agencies are not stupid, they know about this scheme and a thousand others.
Now, I don't know how seriously they're going to police tomatoes, but it's certainly not as simple as making a stop over in Manila.
In the case of sanctions against Iran, the monitoring includes not just tracking AIS transponders, and satellite surveillance, but actual naval groups in the Persian Gulf.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/e-commerce-sites-must...
Consumers will buy something that gives them good value at a cheap price.
For a lot of products it is not even the cost factor, like mechanical keyboards. Somehow the best ones are either brands from there itself like Varmilo or made there like Leopold.
No, it wasn't.
Chattel slavery was converted almost overnight into penal slavery, with largely pretextual criminalization of the exact same group previously subject to chattel slavery, a long time ago in the United States.
We can go buy slaves today in the US. /s
Yes, criminalization of legal acts to recapture the free labor is abhorrent. However, passing the 13th amendment and then fighting a civil war to enforce it at least creates an incredibly strong legal footing for defending people from forced labor.
Criminals paying back their debt to society is a different conversation in terms of the length and harshness of the penality.
No, slaves you can buy as an individual is what you have with chattel slavery.
Slaves whose labor you can rent, or the product of whose labor you can buy, from the state who holds them as convicts (or that the state uses directly for it's own purposes under the same conditions) is what you have with penal slavery.
> However, passing the 13th amendment and then fighting a civil war to enforce it
That...didn't happen. In fact, the Republicans, despite being an ideologically abolitionist party, didn't pursue abolition as a policy, merely limiting (not even stopping) the geographic expansion of slavery, specifically to avoid splitting the union and provoking a civil war.
Great. We're all still talking about the same thing still.
And here I thought everyone was referring to an American practice analogous to the Chinese state forced labor of those who have been deemed harmful to society; while chattel slavery is, I suppose, loosely analogous there, I'd say penal slavery is actually a closer analogy.
Now they relaxed the requirement to 2 and applied it to everyone. Of course it's now immediately a genocide. The previous one, despite harsher limits and usage of the same methods, is evidently not.
Maybe the article is mistaken? It seems like quite a bit more than just applying a one-child policy.
There are 10 million Uyghurs in China. Abortion on hundreds of thousands is quite literally the abortion of the whole population. And hundreds of thousands will be able to attest to this. I have no doubt that China violated a bunch of human rights to enforce the 2 child policy, but calling it a genocide of the Uighur, and then exaggerating or filling in the data by imagination is rich given that it was harsher before and nobody voiced a peep just because it didn't apply to minorities.
I don't like what China is doing, it's probably entirely justified to sanction Xinjiang and the camps. Nobody should have their freedom restricted just because they were born different and believe in different things. But at the same time propaganda outlets manufacturing consent is also disgusting.
What I'm trying to say, is that truth matters. We can't just level unfounded claims because it's convenient, that's how you devolve into a nationalist flame war, with the military industrial complex giggling in the background.
Slavery didn't end in 1865. It's still with us - just a bit out of sight, out of mind.
It is ironic and amusing.
</point>
> prisoners have been digging graves on Hart Island for years
This isn’t really COVID related. Additionally, they are digging graves not necessarily burying bodies.
> is offering prisoners at Rikers Island jail $6 per hour... and personal protective equipment
So they get paid and have personal protective equipment.
ETA I am now reading article after article about this issue, and the fact that this particular industry seems to have cleaned up its act in 2012 doesn't make me feel better about any of it.
To your first point: I have a problem with the unsourced claim that there have been 1000 instances in the past 10 years, which I could not find a source to confirm. To your second about which term I would prefer, I don't set myself up as an authority. But if the op meant 1000 people, he should have said 1000 people. I think it would be clearer than "instance." When I first read that, I wasn't sure if it means "a person" or "a case when a tomato farmer got busted." If the latter, then it would have been way more than 1000 people affected.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/08/wait-do-people-actual...
You'll be forced to work and live in prisons overrun by the pandemic
https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/coronavirus-sweepi...
Even if you're released, you'll be jailed right away if the battery of your electronic monitor will ran out
https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-ankle-monitors-are-anoth...
Tt'll be though rebuilding your life, since employment opportunities are denied to ex-inmates, and thanks to probation fees, you'll be saddled with debts hard to pull away from.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2019/04/09/probation_incom...
Ultimately, if you fail to repay those fees, you'll be jailed again. The system works wonderfully... for the for-profit prisons
https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/capitalizing-...
The US is a modern day dystopia, and I don't think that anyone seriously thinks that China's prison system is as bad as the US'
https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/the-right-to-an-attorne...
It's far from perfect, but better than in the US
Last I checked, in the US, every person is entitled to representation. You want to argue that a country without a separate independent judiciary is capable of producing fairer outcomes for individuals without political collusion?
For example, the US news reported that the UN had condemned the practices in XJ, but in fact it was one US person on one commission that didn't represent the UN as a whole. The US media has to do more than mere assertion. In any case, the current fascist US regime has little credibility on human rights issues given their open support for police murders and various policies of ripping children away from travelers and imprisoning them.
I'd like to say show me the evidence, but unfortunately when I try to read chinese government documents or political discourse I am befuddled by my inability to read chinese. :-/ Note how many US reporters on these stories cannot either.
Considering that an anti-China stance is part of Trump's strategy, and intelligence agencies have been caught lying countless times (e.g. Iraq's WMD) to further their agenda, there's no good reason to believe these accusations.
The Chinese are certainly a totalitarian regime, and it is certain that the people of Xinjiang are not in a good state, and there are certainly political prisoners there. But, as you mentioned, the numbers I've heard of 1-2 million prisoners (there are 10 million Uyghurs in total) in concentration camps and slave labor etc seem extremely exaggerated. Pretty much everyone in china has a phone with a camera, including Uyghurs. You'd think at least a few videos of indisputable evidence would be leaked. If you want to accuse a nation of a holocaust, you must have strong evidence.
And on a tangential note, the US has the world's largest prison population, at 22% of the world's prisoners, and a disproportionate number are black. The Chinese could also spin the situation and say that the Americans are running concentration camps for blacks and be on similar footing.
People mistake the frequency and breadth of repetition of a narrative as a measure of truth value, and the three letter agencies take advantage of this human bias, hence the downvotes for your salient comment. It's not easy to take a contrarian stance in these times.
https://www.nchrd.org/2018/08/china-massive-numbers-of-uyghu...
There are leaked Chinese government documents:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/ch...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50511063
Satellite photos:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/09/ch...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alison_killing/satellit...
Open source Chinese government documents, such as budgets and construction bids:
https://jamestown.org/program/evidence-for-chinas-political-...
But if that's not good enough, please organize an independent investigation team to go to Xinjiang and find out, and tell me how that goes.
I don't see anything in your links that shows much evidence of slave labor or millions in concentration camps.
Is that supposed to be response to this?
>> But if that's not good enough, please organize an independent investigation team to go to Xinjiang and find out, and tell me how that goes.
If it was, then I'll spell out what was meant by my sarcasm: the Chinese government won't allow anyone to conduct a systematic independent investigation, and are quite capable of fatally interfering with such a project. If you set your standard so high as to either require such an investigation or a confession, you've conveniently put yourself in a position to unreasonably deny almost crime or violation anyone's made an attempt to hide.
> I don't see anything in your links that shows much evidence of slave labor or millions in concentration camps.
Estimates vary on the exact total population of the camps, but the lowest credible ones I've seen have been in several hundreds of thousands.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/world/asia/xinjiang-china...:
> Accounts from the region, satellite images and previously unreported official documents indicate that growing numbers of detainees are being sent to new factories, built inside or near the camps, where inmates have little choice but to accept jobs and follow orders....
> Independent accounts from inmates who have worked in the factories are rare. The police block attempts to get near the camps and closely monitor foreign journalists who travel to Xinjiang, making it all but impossible to conduct interviews in the region. And most Uighurs who have fled Xinjiang did so before the factory program grew in recent months.
> But Serikzhan Bilash, a founder of Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights, an organization in Kazakhstan that helps ethnic Kazakhs who have left neighboring Xinjiang, said he had interviewed relatives of 10 inmates who had told their families that they were made to work in factories after undergoing indoctrination in the camps....
> “It’s not as though they have a choice of whether they get to work in a factory, or what factory they are assigned to,” said Darren Byler, a lecturer at the University of Washington who studies Xinjiang and visited the region in April.
> He said it was safe to conclude that hundreds of thousands of detainees could be compelled to work in factories if the program were put in place at all of the region’s internment camps....
> The documents detail plans for inmates, even those formally released from the camps, to take jobs at factories that work closely with the camps to continue to monitor and control them. The socks, suits, skirts and other goods made by these laborers would be sold in Chinese stores and could trickle into overseas markets.
> Kashgar [a city with a population of over 500,000], an ancient, predominantly Uighur area of southern Xinjiang that is a focus of the program, reported that in 2018 alone it aimed to send 100,000 inmates who had been through the “vocational training centers” to work in factories, according to a plan issued in August.
At this point there is enough disinformation coming from both sides that makes it hard for me to understand the true scope.
how about so many interned that they have to build new camps. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/china-new-inter...
The video has a few problems: there's no indication of where in china this is; there's no indication that these are uighurs; there's no indication that these are any particular kind of prisoner (i.e. political vs criminal); and last this doesn't provide any evidence of more than a few dozen or hundred prisoners.
The BuzzFeed article has problems as well. They extrapolate too much from scant or vague evidence. The satellite photos and maps don't provide any solid evidence for their claims. Just pictures of buildings.
The HN crowd is skeptical of heavily documented scientific studies from renowned scientists and picks them with a fine toothed comb, yet accepts political narratives with patchy evidence put forth by parties with conflicts of interest with little skepticism. It's kind of absurd.
Someone actually figured out the exact train station and approximate date of when the video was shot. He even showed his work, if you want to check it:
https://observers.france24.com/en/20190925-drone-video-shows...
> there's no indication that these are uighurs; there's no indication that these are any particular kind of prisoner (i.e. political vs criminal); and last this doesn't provide any evidence of more than a few dozen or hundred prisoners.
> The BuzzFeed article has problems as well. They extrapolate too much from scant or vague evidence. The satellite photos and maps don't provide any solid evidence for their claims. Just pictures of buildings.
This isn't skepticism, it's denialism. There are hundreds of original reports circulated in reputable journals and news outlets that assemble testimony, documents, and circumstantial evidence that paint a pretty indisputable picture there is some kind of ethnicity-based mass imprisonment program going on in Xinjiang. The attempts of the Chinese government to suppress fact-gathering in the region add even more credibility to picture. Sure, you're not going to find some single piece of evidence that proves it all (e.g. a single satellite image of a vast field of prisons capable of holding one million inmates with a sign legible from space that says "Uyghur forced re-education through labor prison complex, population 1,000,000. Don't tell the foreigners!" and has all the inmates standing outside being counted), but to expect something like that is unreasonable. Each article usually presents just one new piece of the larger puzzle, which has been assembled well enough that it's pretty clear what it's of.
https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/china-uyghur-mi...
The buzzfeed study is one of the first decently comprehensive analysis. It doesn't go the actual step to break down each site in detail (i.e. calculate capacity by square footage) which would be actually useful. It does however identify ~300 camps total in the region. The 1-2 million estimate by Zenz that western media regularly repeats is based off his unsubstantiated estimate of 1,200 camps (ASPI). Yet, we're not seeing the corresponding downward revision in numbers.
https://www.aspi.org.au/report/mapping-xinjiangs-re-educatio...
So far, the entire situation can be summed up as willful ignorance to facts because propaganda > truth for geopolitics. State level institutions in the west have the resources to extrapolate the scale of the XJ programs accurately, but the reality is an underwhelmingly boring dystopia (and it is extremely dystopian) as revealed by leaked CCP documents itself. So the narrative is built on a mix of cherry picked facts and fake news. For instance the codastory on XJ work programs cited the minimum compensation for those in the program is 13RMB per hour as a negative, but that's basic entry level manufacturing wage in China and 2x higher than average income of Hotan where that batch of workers were from. Yet no one is going around reporting XJ vocational training detainees from poor agriculture towns are being paid double their usual income for manufacturing jobs. Incidentally maybe also why the Buzzfeed study, partially funded by RFA / Open Technology Fund goes so far as to identify the number of camps but don't go the extra step of estimating internment capacity, preferring to again, repeat Zenz estimates based off poor methodology that concluded 4x camps existed, something the buzzfeed study itself invalidates.
Also, wire feeds and media publications like AP, Guardian etc have their independent reporting on it as well like.[1]
Facts might be getting exaggerated but it is not helped by reluctance of CCP to come clean on issues like Covid-19 origins, beligerence towards anyone who says/does something they dislike and comical claims like nine dash line which they are forcing on others like a bully. These at least are open for everyone to see.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/04/muslim-minorit...
"Her story, first told to the Dutch Uyghur Human Rights Foundation, is difficult to verify. It is hard to take photos inside detention facilities and there is little documentation. But details match accounts by other camp detainees and research into coercive birth control practices."
This person's story is heartbreaking, but it is merely a thread in an investigation if hard evidence isn't there. The DURF, when you go to their website (https://www.duhrf.org/who-are-the-uyghurs/), is run by five apparently anonymous individuals. They have links to other organizations, one of which I know has at least some leadership linked to American regime change projects.
I'm Jewish. I can't stand authoritarian regimes or concentration camps (hence my objections to the current US regime). However, I don't want to be lead by the nose into another war or brutal sanctions regime that kills hundreds of thousands or millions (as has happened many times in the past) because I didn't ask for evidence when it mattered. If China is really doing this stuff, show me hard evidence.
What exactly is "hard evidence" to you?
The point of evidence is to get at the truth, and standards that are either too low or too high both fail to achieve that. The former admits lies; the latter denies truth, which can be thought of another kind of lie.
Though five decades back but US administration ignored the blood telegram[1] when a genocide of millions happened and they supported the regime who did it, so they definitely are not some white knights as well.
It would be hard to get hard evidence I think, there have been videos of prisoner transfers between these camps, satellite footage of these structures but CCP can always spin a different story about them.
Anyway war is something no one should indulge in unless it threatens their own sovereignty, it is not worth it.
I would say sanctions are reasonable though with the evidence we have seen, considering the other things as well which I had mentioned in my original comment.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blood_Telegram:_Nixon,_K...
There's no presumption of innocence here, it is not a criminal court.