In today’s New York Times, my friend Xu Zhiyong, “a public interest lawyer whose organization has investigated black jails,” is quoted in the story the story, “China Investigates Extralegal Petitioner Detentions” by Andrew Jacobs: “The Anyuanding affair [named after a security company which allegedly operated black jails inside of China] is so sinister and damaging, it appears that the public security authorities were left with little choice but to intervene and investigate,” Mr. Xu said. What the article did not mention was that just over a year ago, Xu found himself disappeared when guards pulled him from his apartment early one morning in August 2009 before resurfacing in a Beijing jail where he was being held on the pretext of tax evasion charges. Earlier this year, I wrote about the experience of uncovering the news that he was missing for Foreign Policy in an article entitled “Raging Against the Machine”: Xu Zhiyong was watching the 2004 Democratic convention in a shared common area at a Columbia University dormitory when we first met. After just a …