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 |  Subject: Detainees' case a moral failure for U.S.  Thu Nov 20, 2008 2:12 am | |
| Here's a situation that ought to be an easy test of moral character: Let's say your country's authorities have arrested a group of men and held them in prison for years without charges and without evidence, until they had to admit that there were no grounds to hold the men further.
You can't send the men back to their own country because it's a dictatorship that would probably torture and execute them if you did.
You try to find some country where the arrested men can go, but you find no takers. What should you do?
That's not very difficult, it would seem, especially in light of a further fact in the case: Some groups right here have come forward, offering lodging and other assistance to the imprisoned men. Since they have been determined by the very people who put them in prison in the first place to pose no danger to the nation or the public, wouldn't it make simple moral sense to release them from prison, allow them to start a new life in the United States, perhaps even pay a bit of compensation for their years of deprivation?
Well, in the strange and disturbing case of 17 Chinese citizens, held in the Bush administration's prison of last resort at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that would be my choice, but it's not the choice of the Bush administration, which has been strenuously fighting a U.S. District Court order of last month that the men - all members of the Muslim Uighur minority from far western China - should be immediately released in the United States.
Rather than simply obey this sensible and humanitarian ruling, Justice Department lawyers have been fighting it every inch of the way. First they got an appeals court to issue a stay of the judge's release order, which has kept the 17 Uighurs in Guantánamo.
On Thursday, oral arguments will be held in the government's appeal to have the court ruling reversed. The administration wants to keep the 17 Uighurs in Guantánamo, it says, until a country willing to take them can be found - even though, as the judge noted in his ruling last month, some 100 countries have been asked by the State Department to do exactly that during the past four years, and every one of them refused.
If ever there was a case that exposed the faults of the Guantánamo method for dealing with security threats to the United States, it would have to be that of these 17 Chinese men, whose unending encounter with the American war on terror surely evokes the overused word Kafkaesque.
The men are from Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, the vast, mostly desert expanse of territory whose control by Beijing has provoked all sorts of complaints from human rights monitors, and the U.S. State Department. According to the American government's annual global survey of human rights, the Uighurs are a severely oppressed group and many of them have been sentenced to long prison terms or executed for advocating Xinjiang independence.
Indeed, the State Department has averred, China's own war on terror has been used "as a pretext for cracking down harshly on Uighurs expressing peaceful political dissent."
The 17 Uighurs now in American custody were part of a group of 22 Uighurs who left Xinjiang in the middle of 2001, ending up at a Uighur camp in Afghanistan, which shares a short border with westernmost China. Some of the men got rudimentary training in shooting rifles, and they might have joined up with a Uighur independence group in Afghanistan. But, as the American government has been forced to admit, there is no indication that any of them were terrorists, had any connection to Al Qaeda or the Taliban, or harbored any hostile intent toward the United States.
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Uighur camp was destroyed by American bombers. The 22 men fled to Pakistan, where, according to some of the American lawyers who have been representing them, they were turned over to the U.S. Army by Pakistani bounty hunters.
Next stop, Guantánamo.
There, after several years of brutal treatment, often in solitary confinement, totally cut off from any contact with the outside world or with each other, the men succeeded in having their designation as enemy combatants removed, which is what prompted the Bush administration to try to find a country that would take them. It did so in the case of five of the men, who went to Albania a couple of years ago, but the rest remain caught in what would seem to be a remarkable inconsistency in American policy.
On the one hand, as the State Department has tried to persuade a foreign government to take the men, it makes the argument that the 17 remaining Uighurs pose no danger to public order. On the other hand, in its efforts to get a stay of the federal court's release order, the Justice Department lawyers argued that the Uighurs sought "to commit terrorist acts against a sovereign executive, " namely China. And, somehow, according to this reasoning, while they wouldn't be a danger to any other country, they would be a danger in the United States.
"The administration has been talking out of two sides of its mouth," said Jennifer Daskal, a lawyer at the Washington office of Human Rights Watch. "The truth is," she continued, "that these men if admitted into the U.S. would be a concrete reminder of the administration's failure in setting up Guantánamo in the first place."
In its brief, submitted for the appeals hearing this week, the government's position seems to have shifted a bit. There is no claim anymore that the Uighurs would be a danger to the United States; instead, the Justice Department lawyers have turned to a largely technical jurisdictional matter, saying that it's the executive's prerogative to decide who should be allowed into the United States, not the judiciary's. And so, the Justice Department submission reads, the 17 men are being "housed" in Guantánamo "for their own protection" pending their departure to a country that will take them.
The lawyers for the detainees couldn't resist a bit of mockery aimed at that euphemistic word "housed," saying that the men are being "imprisoned" in Guantánamo, not generously offered housing there. On the more substantive jurisdictional question, the Uighurs' lawyers are arguing, the executive's prerogatives do not give it "a right of indefinite imprisonment" of people that even it has determined to be innocent.
And that, morally speaking, would seem to be the essence of the case. Here are 17 human beings who even the government admits meant no harm to the United States and yet have been involuntarily "housed" for seven years at a place set up for dangerous terrorists.
Under the circumstances, shouldn't we just admit our mistake and give them a new chance in our midst?
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/19/america/letter.php |
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