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Comment by Leary | Hacker News Reader

Shame on the US for misusing the law to achieve its geopolitical objective of handicapping Huawei. Funny how HSBC, the bank that Meng supposedly defrauded, never said they were misled.

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More shame on China for retaliating by arbitrarily detaining two Canadian citizens with no relation to the case, holding them as hostages in all but name, and subjecting them to torture while Meng had to endure a cushy house arrest in her mansion.

https://globalnews.ca/news/8220178/meng-wanzhou-huawei-china...

Torture is a strong word. You better back it up, there is no logical reason for the Chinese government to `torture` them.

> Meng is right now enjoying the freedom of Vancouver’s lovely streets and the luxury of her own $15 million mansion there through privilege of bail in a free and open democratic society under the rule of law. The two Michaels, by painful contrast, suffer conditions equal to torture in the lawless Chinese gulag.

> Pre-trial detention in China is used as a weapon of duress which, in its aggregate, adds up to torture. The accused are held in harsh conditions in a “detention center” designed to break resistance and crush the human spirit in order to extort a confession. As a result, such self-incriminating confessions, when they happen, are false. The following description of those detention conditions comes from my own experiences during 23 months in captivity, in addition to listening to and reading about other prisoners’ experiences, including conversations with prisoners released in 2019.

Full description: https://thediplomat.com/2019/12/the-cruel-fate-of-michael-ko...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#Controversies

If Huawei is really so clearly in the wrong, why not go after them for things they did that actually matter instead of victimless actions that the "victim" was absolutely OK with and that happened between three non-US entities outside of the US?

Huawei is on a trade blacklist because of breaking Iran sanctions in this case...

Then fine Huawei. Oh wait, you can't, you already cut them off from the US market.

Unless your argument is to start imposing US law on foreign citizens operating on foreign lands, I think you understand exactly why this is problematic.

The United States considers any transaction in USD within their jurisdiction.

Huawei and Iran should have been doing business in a different currency, and frankly I don't understand why they weren't.

Actually, that's not true. Transactions under the US dollar are not automatically under US jurisdiction.

The loophole is that financial entities that can deal in the US financial system are supposed to do that through a US subsidiary, allowing jurisdiction through that.

The issue there though is that Meng Wenzhou did not actually do anything illegal with the HSBC subsidiary. The US claims she did, but there is no evidence to the US claim and evidence to the contrary.

At this point the US could go after Huawei for dealing with Iran, but Huawei is already maximally sanctioned.

The US could go after HSBC but they don't operate in the US anymore either and it would probably lose or they would get away with it as they always do. Plus the UK would be very mad.

The loophole was to request extradition of Meng Wenzhou over a crime that everyone knows never happened. But if the crime actually happened is not what's at question in the extradition process, that's decided in US courts.

And once Meng Wenzhou is actually in the US, the US can do anything they want to her, no foreign court binds then anymore. She can also be used as a bargaining chip during the extradition process or after extradition.

It's broadly the same procedure as with Assange. Stick him with a crime that didn't actually happen, extradite him, then do whatever you want once he's on US soil.

Thank you for the clarification!

What a joke! As if PRISM and the NSA weren't shown to spy on all traffic flowing through the US whether it was by US citizens or not. It's all okay when the US uses their resources to spy on foreigners but they take the moral high ground when Huawei might do it to them? All after the recent end of a pointless 20 year invasion of Afghanistan where literally 100,000s of citizens died, the whole country is fucked, in comparison to a few thousand US soldiers. Of course no one in western media even bothered reporting how many Afghan citizens died, let alone showing an ounce of remorse.