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In the 30 years I’ve lived in this country, I have never witnessed a more shameful and cowardly performance than that of Congress denying the Obama administration funds to move Guantanamo detainees to high security prisons  in the United States.

It’s not like the NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) concept is alien to me; it’s just that I never thought I would see such irrational fear and illogic displayed to the world in a way that was so utterly brainless, gutless and weak-kneed.

America’s prisons house serial killers, rapists, sociopaths and psychopaths and other evil doers to compare with any country in the world. Yet our representatives and senators, not to mention their constituents, are scared shitless at the thought of having some of the prisoners at Guantanamo incarcerated even in US military prisons. It’s hard to know whether their fear is of the detainees escaping en masse to wreak havoc in their communities or the thought that al-Qaida might launch an invasion of, say, Fort Leavenworth to free them.

The city council of Hardin, Montana, hoping to boost a sagging economy, has stepped up to the plate by offering to house some of the detainees in a newly built prison that the state now says it no longer needs. “Over my dead health-care plan” says Senator Max Baucus (or words to that effect anyway), ever the study in political courage.

And then there’s the issue of where to put those detainees who have been determined not to be enemy combatants. These are the people whom we scooped up in the Bush administration’s panic-ridden response to 9/11, held for several years in conditions that most of us don’t want to know about, only to find that they were no threat to us after all. Many of them can’t go home because they would likely be imprisoned, tortured and killed by their own governments.

We had an opportunity to release one such group, Muslim Chinese called Uighurs, into the US. These have no axe to grind against the US but oppose the Chinese government’s policies towards the Muslim population. There are Uighurs in the US already, including a community in the Washington DC area. Had we been willing to bring them to the US we might have had more luck convincing European governments to take other detainees.

But no, jittery politicians and a frightened electorate don’t want to hear about it.  The gutsier souls of Bermuda and Palau have put us to shame and agreed to take in some of the Uighurs.

So my question is this: how is it that a country capable of fielding such valiant and dedicated men and women in its armed forces who serve their country so bravely, can be otherwise so bereft of courage?

Dick Cheney on Face the Nation, May 10, 2009:

The group that’s left, the 245 or so, these are the worst of the worst. This is the hard core. You’d have a recidivism rate out of this group of maybe 50 or 60 percent. They want to get out because they want to kill more Americans. And you’re just going to find it very difficult to send them any place. Now, as I say, there has been some talk on the part of the administration about putting them in the United States.

So are they really the “worst of the worst?”

Hardly…

ST. GEORGE, Bermuda — Almost exactly seven years after arriving at Guantánamo in chains as accused enemy combatants, and four days after their surprise predawn flight to Bermuda, four Uighur Muslim men basked in their new-found freedom here, grateful for the handshakes many residents had offered and marveling at the serene beauty of this tidy, postcard island.

…

The men were among a larger group of Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) who had fled what they called Chinese persecution of Muslims in western China and spent part of 2001 in a Uighur camp in Afghanistan. They fled, apparently unarmed, when the Americans bombed the camp, and were later turned in to the authorities by Pakistani villagers in return for an American bounty.

The four brought here, like 13 other Uighurs still at Guantánamo but expected to depart soon to other destinations, had been cleared by American officials and courts of taking up arms against the United States or ties to global terrorism.

But proposals to resettle them in the United States caused a political furor that the Obama administration did not want to aggravate. On Sunday, these four expressed a surprising lack of bitterness toward the United States, saying — as they had during interrogations years ago in Guantánamo — that they had never been anti-American and just wanted to get on with their lives.

…

From the men’s own statements, it is clear that their presence in Afghanistan was linked to their animosity toward China. Whatever they might have wished in 2001, there is no evidence they sought to become part of a global jihad.

Now, over Chinese objections, the men are being released to third countries.

Around a dozen of the Uighurs will be going to Palau, an island nation of about 20,000 people just east of The Phillipines.  A New Zealand paper reports:

Palau is one of a handful of countries that does not recognise China and maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

President Johnson Toribiong said Palau was accepting the detainees “as a humanitarian gesture” intended to help them restart their lives.

And today’s Los Angeles Times quotes President Toribiong, a former defense attorney who earned his law degree at the University of Washington:

“These people are not monsters,” said Toribiong, who, with graying hair and glasses, looks pensive, even professorial. “They should be presumed innocent because no one has proven them guilty.”

That sounds perfectly reasonable to anyone with basic knowledge of Western laws and the concept of habeus corpus, but it sounds crazy to people like Dick Cheney who think the Executive Office has the power to detain and torture suspects indefinitely without ever even charging or convicting them of crimes.

Just last week Cheney said the only other option besides imprisoning “combatants” at Guantánamo was ”to kill them, and we don’t operate that way.”

Worst of the worst?  That would be Dick Cheney and his gang.

UPDATE:  or more like “backdate”  on this story…  N.J. Barnes wrote about the plight of the imprisoned Uighurs way back in 2007.  This post is about some of them being released to Albania.

A story in the Sunday New York Times highlights the absurdity, not to mention immorality, of the Bush administration’s detention of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Ahktar Qassim Basit and a group of four other Muslim men who are ethnic Uighurs from western China were held in Guantanmo detention for four years, after being handed over to the Americans by Pakistan.  They had been camped near Tora Bora in Afghanistan, as part of a separatist group whom the Chinese government view as terrorists.  When the Americans attacked the Taliban and al-Qaida in 2001, the Uighurs fled to Pakistan, only to be arrested and wind up in Guantanamo.

After finally determining that the men posed no threat to the United States, the Americans asked scores of countries to accept them as refugees, since returning them to China meant a likelihood of torture and death.  The only taker was – wait for it – Albania.  So these five guys are plucked from four years of Uncle Sam’s harsh treatment at Guantanamo and dumped in Albania, their heads spinning, wondering” “What the…?”.

Now there’s a good chance they picked up some English at Guantanamo.  They may even have learned a few words of Arabic or Urdu.  But Albanian?  Not likely.  These bewildered souls are now trying to make sense of their lives, separated as they are from their families, unable to get work among people whose language they don’t speak and whose society is completely alien to them.  Unbelievably they are the lucky ones; almost twenty others remain in limbo in Guantanamo because the Chinese government has scared off other countries, including Albania, from providing refuge.  

Which begs the obvious question: why won’t we Americans take them?   Well conveniently, the Department of Homeland Security has deemed them inadmissible to the US because of their association with an organization that has engaged in terrorism – even though their separatist group grew out of resistance to the harsh oppression of the Chinese authorities and had only a very loose connection to the Taliban.    

Congress needs to take a hand legislatively, if necessary, to right the wrong we have inflicted on these people and provide a safe haven for them and their families in the US.  And while we’re at it, how about welcoming to our shores a heck of a lot more of those Iraqis who have risked everything by serving with US civilian and military authorities in their country? 

UPDATE:  More Uighurs released to Bermuda and Palau in 2009.