MoJo Video: The Ex-Gitmo Detainee Next Door
If freed by a federal court, 17 Uighurs imprisoned at Gitmo may find new homes in northern Virginia. What will the neighbors think?
On a recent Saturday night, 200 or so members of Washington, DC's Uighur community gathered at the Northern Virginia Community College cultural center to celebrate Nation's Day. The event commemorated the Central Asian ethnic group's creation of the Republic of East Turkistan and declaration of independence from China—twice (once in 1933 and again in 1944). The Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurz) spent the evening listening to traditional poetry recited by an elderly man in a sequined hat who occasionally burst into patriotic a cappella song, calling on people to throw off the yoke of oppression. Dark-suited men and women in elegant shiny head wraps clapped along with accordion music and consumed traditional Uighur party food: a whole lamb kebob, which was quickly stripped to the bone by hungry guests and their gaggle of children. The attendees represented a large chunk of the nation's tiny Uighur community. Yet the festive event was most notable for who wasn't there: 17 Uighur men who have been wrongly detained at Guantanamo Bay for nearly seven years.
The suburban Virginia Uighurs had hoped the men would attend the festivities after a federal judge in DC ordered the detainees released into the US in October. The 17 men would have been the first Guantanamo detainees who are not US citizens allowed into the United States. The Uighur community was ecstatic with the ruling, but the excitement was short-lived. A day after US District Judge Ricardo Urbina ordered the detainees released, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals granted the Justice Department's emergency request to stay his decision. Relying on McCarthy-era legal precedent, Justice Department lawyers argued that even though the men are no longer considered enemy combatants—they've been cleared many times over of that status—detaining them indefinitely at Guantanamo is still legal. The court will hear oral arguments Monday morning over whether or not Urbina's order to bring the men to the US should be enforced.
The long-running Uighur saga is one of the most heart-wrenching and complex stories to arise out of the global fight against terrorism since the September 11 attacks. The fate of the 17 detainees holds great symbolic value for both the Bush administration and human rights activists who believe that the Uighurs represent all that has gone wrong with the administration's war on terror.
A Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic group, Uighurs hail from a region along the old Silk Road in western China. Their Republic of East Turkistan was an independent country from 1864 until 1876, when the Manchu empire reinvaded and, after a bloody eight-year war, renamed it Xinjiang (meaning "new frontier"). In 1949, Chinese communists annexed the area. The Uighurs have long faced political and religious repression at the hands of the Chinese that has included everything from forced abortions and death penalties for dissent to the relocation of educated Uighurs to remote parts of the country.
In response, there have been outbursts of violence credited to Uighur nationalist groups, but those have been rare. Uighur exiles in the US say that the Chinese government has inflated the threat of terrorism from Uighurs as an excuse to crack down on the religious minority. Nonetheless, in 2002, the Bush administration officially designated the Uighurs' East Turkistan Islamic Movement a terrorist group as it attempted to win Chinese support for its invasion of Iraq. Uighur exile groups and other human rights experts criticized the designation at the time, saying that it was based on thin charges from the Chinese and that its main result would be more Chinese oppression of the Uighurs. As it turned out, the designation set the stage for the indefinite detention of 17 men from Xinjiang who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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To allow Bushco to completely and thoroughly disreguard the anti-fascist covenants such as the Nuremburg Trials that U.S. Judge Jackson chaired and says that the planning and doing of agressive war is the supreme crime on the planet earth, as it sets in motion all other crimes high, low, big, and small, is to ignore the U.S. constitution that further says that international treaties signed on to by the U.S.A. are the supreme laws of the land, alows Bushco to get away with creating unjust agreements at expense of the American and worlds peoples victories over the fascist tyranny of military dictatorship. When will that lier and thief of the public treasury be brought to justice and the horror and terror that is Guantanamo be over with. These men have been declared as innocents by American law and still they are denighed by laws that are medieval which rules by might is right and to heck with innocents of public trials, habeous corpus, juries or any other lawyers or judges. Only faulty medieval militarism rules. OBamas promise to close the Guantanamo Bay torture center and stop torture throughout the U.S. is needed now and sooner rather than later.
Bush is a war criminal and should be prosecuted and sent to Gitmo.
This is quite mind blowing. Albeit, General Grant said that the transgressions of Nations come back to roost (my rewording) when discussing the Mexican-American war, of which he was an active participant. I believe, he felt that the Civil War was what came back to roost. He obviously believed in the battle for our Union and human dignity and won the war. At the same time, I believe he was quite sickened by the death and destruction happening. Rolling the clock forward to today, we do have a pickle that will bite us back oneday. Maybe, this economic meltdown is our penance. After all, without a healthy economy we really could fund our future transgressions.
when many prisioners were brough to the Guantanamo base in Cuba by the United States government, the idea that some of the inmates would be wrongly taken was a posibility that could come with the mess of war.
The idea that some would have to be allowed into the states after the conclution that the person was not involved in terrorism was also a possibility due that the probabilities that the person would be killed if sent back to iraq by militias, were high.
Now we also have the probability that someone involved in terrorism was not proven against him.
so now the probability that you can have a terrorist in your neigborhood brought to you by the government, is a possibility.
The government against the people...WMD's ?.? Mobile Poison Gas Laboratories ?.? Mid-Range Missles ?.? Smoking Gun Going To Be A Mushroom Cloud...Ground Zero New York City " the Air Is Safe To Breathe -.- Must Get Wall Street Up And Running ".
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Surgeon General’s Warning: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, And May Complicate Pregnancy
BUT The Taxes are ?.? WHY OUTLAW A CASH COW...$ $ $ $....EXPORT OUR JOBS $ $ $ $...Illegal Immigration sending money home ( do you think the money isn't comming out of your pocket ?.? )
Waterboarding was TORTURE during WWII WE prosecuted NAZI's for it.... Bush says it isn't -.- while granting himself immunity from the laws governing TORTURE
Alberto Gonzales -.- Karl Rove -.- Scooter Libby -.- Vice-President Richard Cheney -.- Abramoff..Condellesa Rice (smoking gun fame) -.- Christine Todd Whitman (the air is safe to breathe fame)....
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The People Look To The COURTS -.- For Justice -.- ?.? and which Supreme Court Justice (?????) golfs with, goes fishing with, hunting with, BUT IS NOT A CONFLICT OF INTERESTS ( is the interest how much you can stuff in your pocket ??? )
Bailout -.- Bailout -.- Bailout -.-
F R A U D -.- F R A U D -.- F R A U D -.- Which is WHY THEY CAN NOT EXPLAIN -.- THE PEOPLE ARE TOO STUPID TO UNDERSTAND ?.?.?.?.?
You'd think that a country (us) that currently (and illegally) scorns the international rule of law, wouldn't have any problem releasing fighters whose target is limited to a nation we recognize as oppressive -- and only one small "frontier" of that nation, to boot.
But nOoo, our relationship with China is too "fragile" to risk "offending" them by pursuing our own philosophy of freedom. Not only do we stifle justified criticism of China's policies, but we muzzle our "voice of freedom" in that interest; and end up doing the bidding of a regime we criticize for the very actions we wink at. This is not the way MY country should be acting.
This is not a picture of principled action. Rather, it's a picture of an incestuous relationship of power with power. Our strength as a country -- both in "real" terms, and in terms of the strength of our convictions as a people -- comes from our willingness to do hard and great things, AND our UN-willingness to compromise our core principles in the process.
If it makes better sense, cast it in school-yard bullying terms. This may seem a simplistic comparison, but interactions at the national level scale nicely from a "competing adolescents" level.
The kid with the biggest fists and the least self-respect is often the bully. China fits this to a tee: they do hold immense corporial power, and their self-image is quite fragile; as witnessed by their serial whining about the "insults" to their country, committed by any sort of truthful reportage during the recent Olympics in Beijing, and the manifold cheating they employed in order to dominate at those games, and "impress" the world.
So where do we fit in? Well, before about later decades of the last century, we still tenuously held the position of the kid who just wants to be left alone, but who will stand up for the smaller kids, when the bully gets out of hand. Now, however, we look more like a suck-up who wants to be in the bully's good graces, and so will turn a blind eye to his abuses.
This makes us a great crony to totalitarianism, and gives the bullies great reason to doubt our word and test us, whenever we do make a stand of principle. It also sells out the autonomy of those who believe as we (used to) do, that everyone has the right to self-determination, and to freedom from repression.
How can a person -- or country -- who settles for the pacification of bullies by yielding to their demands, expect any sort of respect after that, either from the bullies, or from the bully's victims? If we want respect from the world, we must (again!) learn the lesson China still hasn't learnt: that respect comes from doing the right -- albeit harder --thing; not from caving in to threats.
hope your new neighbours will celebrate with some bombings around your area.
Dan, that all souds great but are you really willing to risk your life and the lives of everyone in your family by having these people released into your neighborhood? While it would be great to shut down GITMO, I am not willing to risk my kids lives' just so people who have no business here get to be released into this country. They should be released back to their own country, they have no right to be here.
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