Gaffney warns: Obama "determined to unleash" Uighur detainees on US
SUMMARY: The Washington Times' Frank Gaffney wrote of 17 Uighur detainees currently held at Guantánamo Bay: "There is another group of dangerous aliens Obama seems determined to unleash on the American people." However, the Bush administration reclassified those detainees as "no longer enemy combatants."
In his May 12 Washington Times column, Frank Gaffney Jr. wrote of 17 Uighur detainees currently held at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility: "There is another group of dangerous aliens [President] Obama seems determined to unleash on the American people: [Secretary of Homeland Security Janet] Napolitano's organization may have to cope in the near future with 17 Chinese Uigars [sic] trained in terrorism in Afghanistan." In fact, as Media Matters for America has noted, the Bush administration reclassified all 17 detainees belonging to the Uighur ethnic group from western China as "no longer enemy combatants" following a June 2008 appeals court ruling finding that one of the detainees, Huzaifa Parhat, did not merit enemy combatant status.
After the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the Uighurs' release into the United States in October 2008, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned that decision in a February 18 opinion, in which the majority summarized the Uighurs' situation:
In the Parhat case, the [appeals] court ruled that the government had not presented sufficient evidence that the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement was associated with al Qaida or the Taliban, or had engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners. Parhat, 532 F.3d at 850. Parhat therefore could not be held as an enemy combatant. The government saw no material differences in its evidence against the other Uighurs, and therefore decided that none of the petitioners should be detained as enemy combatants.
Releasing petitioners to their country of origin poses a problem. Petitioners fear that if they are returned to China they will face arrest, torture or execution. United States policy is not to transfer individuals to countries where they will be subject to mistreatment. Petitioners have not sought to comply with the immigration laws governing an alien's entry into the United States. Diplomatic efforts to locate an appropriate third country in which to resettle them are continuing. In the meantime, petitioners are held under the least restrictive conditions possible in the Guantanamo military base.
The appeals court panel majority held that the federal courts lacked the authority to order the government to release the Uighurs into the United States:
The government has represented that it is continuing diplomatic attempts to find an appropriate country willing to admit petitioners, and we have no reason to doubt that it is doing so. Nor do we have the power to require anything more.
From Gaffney's May 12 Washington Times column:
There is another group of dangerous aliens Mr. Obama seems determined to unleash on the American people: Ms. Napolitano's organization may have to cope in the near future with 17 Chinese Uigars trained in terrorism in Afghanistan. They have been held in recent years at Guantanamo Bay and reportedly are slated for release in Alexandria. In addition, although legislators of both parties increasingly are voicing objections, the president's decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay without a plan for its detainees seems likely, all other things being equal, to result in many of them coming to penitentiaries here -- at who knows what risk to the American people?
"Determined to Unleash"!
So, in other words, whenever our prison system incarcerates criminals, that means judges are UNLEASHING THEM ON AMERICA!
Do they prefer the balmy digs and custom menus at Gitmo...or...a trip down Cadbury Lane and other assorted thuggery in a U.S. prison?
When the Uighurs have the audacity to complain about what happened to them and the conditions in which they have endured, we can simply deem them too sensitive.
Which do you think they would prefer? The tropical island breezes or the musty laundry room with the Shawshank queens?
What freaking sense did it make, to drag these men off to Cuba?
I mean is it too late to ask what the strategy was there, what was the long term plan, was it figured that they'd spend the rest of the natural days in Cuba, or did anyone ever look down the road far enough, to wonder where the freak these characters go after they go to Cuba?
Thanks a lot George W. Bush and Dick Cheney: CUBA!
What a brilliant idea!
And I think those two names should always be said, early and often, when talking about what to do with those brainless toothless idiots at Guantanamo Bay... and that's my impression of these various characters in that Cuban facility, that they were variously too stupid to get themselves released from the custody of U.S. Troops who were simply under orders to take these idiots and process them... and once captive, these toothless dopes couldn't tell stories well enough to get themselves released, or had no money or no family and political connections to get out of custody... and so being in the pipeline but too stupid or unconnected to get released, they wound up in Cuba... CUBA! Again, what freaking sense did that make? What exactly was the plan?
Thanks a lot George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, is there even a single problem you created in Office that you solved before leaving Office, or did you solve not a one, and hand them all off to the next administration?
Like I said, say those names early and often, when talking about this mess.
As far as those brainless toothless idiots at Guantanamo Bay, the ones too poor to get themselves out of custody, or had not the friends and family and political connections to get released, and probably got snatched because they simply slept in on the morning of the raid?
Push the reset button: take their stupid azzes back to the jurisdiction from where they were originally snatched, and give them to the authorities of that jurisdiction to do with as they like... and if someone wants to complain and say those authorities won't accept these idiots, despite the dopes having been snatched from that place originally, then so what and who cares, take the idiots there anyway and just release them... we need no more permission from anybody to put these dopes back, than we needed to take them from there in the first place, take them to Cuba CUBA for cripe's sake!
And they call that "keeping us safe"?
In truth I don't think there ever was any kind of plan or strategy to the concept of "detainees" and especially to "detainees at Guantanamo Bay."
It's always been my impression that they rounded up as many of these characters from Afghanistan as they could, and placed them strangely in Cuba, for the very reason that once there, they were beyond all the processes and inquiries and investigations of the American legal and judicial system, and as such, anything and everything the Bush administration wished to claim about these "detainees", could never really be questioned or subject to any inquiry or examination, or even any hearing or public record inspection.
They could then claim they had the "mastermind or masterminds" behind the attacks of September 11 2001, and who could ever examine or question that claim, when those supposed "masterminds" are beyond all our powers of inquiry and investigation and hearing, which is to say beyond the powers of our American legal and judicial system: beyond these our powers, by way of them being in Cuba.
It doesn't wash though.
No one believes it, least of all me.
None of these toothless brainless idiots from Afghanistan and now in Cuba, have ever even been to the United States, and so therefore they are not participants in the attacks of September 11 2001, and so therefore there is no Justice for what happened that day, by way of charging and trying and convicting a bunch of Afghanistan stooges in Cuba.
You may have already known this.