While today is a holiday, it is by no means one to rest and forget. Under the radar in recent news is the parallel policies of the Chinese and Vietnamese governments, particularly when they concern dissidents. As Google’s threat to pull the plug on its Chinese operations continues to stir conversations in Beijing and Washington, many do not know about similarities between Beijing and Hanoi.

Two days from today, Nguyen Tien Trung will face trial on charge of treason by the Vietnamese government. Trung, a French-educated pro-democracy blogger and software engineer, had first been drafted by the Vietnamese army following his return from France and arrested the day after his dishonorable discharge. He is founder of the Young Vietnamese for Democracy Association and, according to government media, a member of the banned Democratic Party of Vietnam.

Trung’s was part of a series of high-profile summer arrests that included Le Cong Dinh, Tran Huynh Duy Thuc, Nguyen Si Binh. The first is one of Vietnam’s top human rights lawyers and a former Fulbright scholar at Tulane, the second is chairman of a top Vietnamese Internet company, the third is a Vietnamese-American democracy activist. The American government, Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders have all called for their immediate release.

Government media has also been particularly preoccupied with these cases. VTV, the government’s central news channel, devoted a significant amount of prime-time to air the four’s public confessions. Similarly, many major national newspapers carried the full text of their confessions. While the Vietnamese government is no stranger to human rights-related arrests, the extent of official attention it has showered on these four is still surprising.

The spotlight is shifting away from Le Cong Dinh, the American-educated lawyer with an international reputation, towards Nguyen Tien Trung, as the latter’s trial date nears. Trung is merely 26 years old, far younger than the other three middle-aged men. Trung graduated from Le Hong Phong High School, southern Vietnam’s academic powerhouse. He then went on to graduate school in computer science in southern France, where he was an outstanding student. His profile eerily matches that of many young Vietnamese who have the opportunity to study abroad. Many will surely be watching the outcome of his trial, where he may face the death sentence.

In a recent article, the New York Times highlights the simmering tension between Google’s 80 million Chinese users and their government. At the same time, Vietnamese Facebook users have had trouble accessing the site for months and blame the government for this partial block. With a former Fulbright scholar in jail and a young blogger on trial, Hanoi’s suspicious eye on Beijing, bauxite and imperial past notwithstanding, may just relax.

The Obama administration’s attention is currently solely fixed on Afghanistan, and understandably so.  The President has rejected all of the proposals set before him by his war council and continues to ponder over whether or not to employ an Iraq-styled “surge” in Afghanistan.  While considering the question of whether to increase troops or not, he should also ask if the “success” he would be looking to replicate with the surge is the type of success he wants.  The decision facing Obama has been compared to the dilemmas faced by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 with respect to Vietnam.  “Eikenberry’s stand” gives the President some time to continue to weigh the pros and cons of a troop increase.  During this time, he should not only refer back to the consequences of Johnson’s decisions in Vietnam, but also to what is shaping up to become an untenable peace in Iraq.

David Schulman notes in the aforementioned BR article, “[Nawi] will not be the first imprisoned for defending the defenseless.” Today we salute not only our veterans but peace activists who work to make suffering and war unnecessary. Read more about the current state of Israel’s peace movement in “Peace Out” by Helena Cobban, from the July/August 2009 issue of Boston Review.

Meanwhile, Obama’s meeting on Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reached no firm conclusion. Speaking to the UN, Obama insisted that peace negotiations should resume without preconditions–thereby sidestepping the Palestinian demand for a freeze on Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank. Obama impatiently pushes ahead, but might do well to consult another piece from the BR archive (one of my favorites): Joseph Levine’s History Matters, in which he dissects the historical claims and current status of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Contrary to the U.S.’s current easing up on Netanyahu, Levine asserts:

As the occupier and principal aggressor, Israel must demonstrate good faith by taking significant actions to meet Palestinian demands. If Israel does not enact such measures, then the world community, especially the United States and the United Nations—the external parties chiefly responsible for the terrible situation in the first place—must employ sanctions to ensure Israeli compliance.

Strong words, but I encourage you to read the rest of Levine’s argument and reflect as we wait for negotiations to commence.

In BR’s January/February issue, David Cole grappled with the same question – and reached a remarkably similar conclusion. Detention without trial, Cole argued, was not only legal, but necessary. Many detainees could not be brought to trial in the U.S. under international law. What they could be afforded, he claimed, was some modicum of due process – proceedings to clarify whether they had actually been members of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, for example. “Enhanced interrogation techniques,” moreover, would be firmly out of the question. Above all, Cole wrote, “Guantánamo is a black mark because of this resistance to law and refusal to recognize the basic human dignity of the detainees. If we are to fix the problem, we need not abandon military detention, but we must subject it to the rule of law.”

Still, Cole endorses a legally shaky principle of detention without trial as a “preventative” measure, meant to prevent strongly suspected terrorists from reengaging in violence. According to a recent New York Times article, one in seven former detainees returns to terrorism after release.

International humanitarian law affords Cole – and Obama – more flexibility with the Guantánamo detainees than they would have for domestic terror suspects. But human rights groups have been critical of ideas like these, which appear to represent an intermediary step between the “ad hoc” policies of the Bush years and a doctrinaire approach to detention that would essentially follow an established legal order — whether domestic or international. Leaks from a meeting between representatives from several leading human rights organizations and Obama indicate that they now see little difference between his policies and those of George W. Bush.

Lurking behind these debates are several definitional problems.

The detainees held at Guantánamo, many agree, are in legal limbo because their status falls outside both U.S. and international law. The “torture memos” authored by Bush administration Justice Department officials took pains to point this out. The question was whether this loophole allowed the U.S. to indefinitely detain and treat detainees outside any established legal framework, or whether it was compelled to release them — in other words, whether the absence of law covering a given situation allowed for the exercise of arbitrarily-applied, “ad hoc” power, or forestalled states from acting at all.

The issue of torture and detainment, then, was never really about the “rule of law”. The “law” in question did not exist. In this vein, the human rights organizations with which Obama met remain adamant that the president’s stated goal of preventing American image problems from becoming incitements to increased international tension would be best served by fidelity to the values Obama claims to lionize — not just as criteria by which to interpret law, but as means in and of themselves.

What remains an open question is what approach is more pragmatic in terms of preventing terrorism. To what extent can Obama maintain an intermediary approach without inflaming world opinion such that releasing the remaining detainees might be the lesser danger? So far, he has made mostly symbolic gestures. His proclamations upon entering office that Guantánamo would be closed and torture ended have run up against serious criticism from within his own party, which blocked funds for the closure due to the administration’s lack of a serious plan, and which demand a serious attempt to bring the architects of the Bush administration’s torture regime to accountability — if not justice.

Obama does appear to be revising some of his policies. Today, it was announced that a detainee accused of involvement in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania would be transferred for trial at a civilian court in New York. And Obama claims – despite vociferous attempts by Republicans to turn it into a national security issue – that many more detainees will be brought back to U.S. shores.

But with military tribunals set to continue, and the massive, Guantánamo-esque prison in Bagram, Afghanistan set to remain open, it will be increasingly difficult for Obama to claim he is turning the page on the Bush years, particularly given his reluctance to pursue either hearings or investigations of administration officials. Obama was aware enough of the role the U.S.’ reputation plays in ensuring its security to forestall the release of more photos of detainee abuse. Putting off accountability for existing evidence detainee abuse, however – Obama has claimed that transparency will come, later – may be a move laden with just as much risk.

Chris Szabla is a law student at Harvard and an editorial assistant at Boston Review.