Look at this from a larger perspective. US killed a million random civilians in an attempt to to squash terrorism - and largely failed. China appears to have achieved this in an incomparably more humanitarian way. If this works out, this means:

1. USA failed (again)

2. They committed world's largest genocide since WW2

3. For no good reason

This is an absolutely terrible outcome from PR point of view, so it's natural for US to try to prevent China from being successful in doing that. And pretending that temporarily imprisoning people is somehow more evil than killing them seems to be working, even here on HN.