Day: December 24, 2008

I am always amazed at the lengths the Bush administration will go to beat up on the dispossessed!  I’ve blogged about this before, but mention it again here because these Chinese Muslims are caught between the rock and hard place of the US and their own country.

China said Tuesday it wants 17 Muslim Chinese terror suspects returned if the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba is closed by U.S. President-elect Barack Obama.

Although the U.S. military no longer considers the 17 Chinese Uighurs “enemy combatants,” they have remained at Guantanamo because the United States has been unable to find a country willing to take them.

In 2006, the United States allowed five Chinese Muslims released from Guantanamo to go to Albania. The U.S. government has said it cannot return the Uighurs to China because they would face persecution there.

The Obama camp has not made clear what it would do with the Uighurs. But State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the Bush administration understood China’s point of view but needed to “assure ourselves that if people are transferred out of Guantanamo under whatever status that they are not going to be mistreated in any way, shape or form.

We can’t turn them over to China because they won’t  be persecuted as well as they currently are under US control in Guantanamo seems to be the message authorities are sending.  As for finding a country for the Uighurs, many relief groups in the US have stepped forward to claim responsibility for them which the government has refused.   Go figure.