Guantánamo Bay Prisoners: The Worst of the Worst?
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?”
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.
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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.
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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.
