Tag: Uighurs

Now this is FUNNY!


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.

It doesn’t get worse than this


I was speechless when I read this.  People who the government claims aren’t “evil doers” and have essentially done nothing wrong face the possibility of staying in jail the rest of their lives because of OUR mistake?

Seventeen Chinese prisoners who have been held for nearly seven years in Guantánamo Bay will be informed on Monday that they could spend the rest of their lives behind bars, even though they face no charges and have been told by a judge they should be freed.

No country is willing to accept them and the US justice department has now blocked moves for them to be allowed to go to the US mainland, where they had been offered a home by refugee and Christian organisations.

*snip*

Last month a federal judge ruled that the men should be freed. “They were on freedom’s doorstep,” said Willett. “The plane was at Gitmo. The stateside Lutheran refugee services and the Uighur families and Tallahassee clergy were ready to receive them.” However, the justice department appealed against the ruling and Willett claims this will put the men into a potentially endless limbo.

I suppose the federal government thinks 17 Chinese muslims will pollute the gene pool of the US….or maybe carry out the jihad it has already acknowledged they had no part in, or maybe we’re just too dumb to say ‘we were wrong’.  People of good faith have appealed to the government to let these men go free and have stepped up to take responsibility for them, but evidently that’s not good enough.  Christians, Muslims, Americans, Chinese have all said they will sponsor these men, who are guiltless according to our own government and whose only crime is “being” to help them settle in this wide, expansive, generous land of ours and our government has said no!