This story was difficult to piece together because of the intense secrecy pervading everything the Bush administration does. But thanks to the unstinting efforts of several human rights attorneys and other activists, a reasonably clear picture has emerged. This is just the latest of multiple abominations perpetrated by the Bush administration in pursuit of its “War on Terror”. It provides one more reason why the incoming Obama administration needs to do something about this as soon as it feasibly can.
How the Uyghurs came to be detained at Guantanamo BayThe
Uyghur people are a Muslim ethnic group from Central Asia who live primarily in a specific region of northwestern China. In China they are a persecuted minority.
Information on how more than 20 of them ended up in Guantanamo Bay comes mainly from interrogations and court documents: Apparently, as a result of persecution by the Chinese government, many of them fled China in 2001. Many of them subsequently ended up in Afghanistan, where they received military training, probably provided by the Taliban. When the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan in December 2001, many of the Uyghurs fled to Pakistan. Some of them were then picked up by bounty hunters and delivered to the U.S. Army, whereupon they were declared “unlawful enemy combatants” and sent to Guantanamo Bay, where they have remained imprisoned for several years.
Here is some testimony from one of the detainees, which explains his motives:
That is true, I went to Afghanistan. The reason is number one: I am scared of the torture from my home country. Second: if I go there I will get some training to fight back against the (deleted) government…
We have nothing to do with the Taliban or the Arabs. We have nothing to do with the U.S. government or coalition forces… I want you to understand what our goal is: just to fight against the (deleted) government.
Detention at Guantanamo Bay as “unlawful enemy combatants”The Uyghurs were then held at Guantanamo Bay for approximately two years with the designation of “unlawful enemy combatants”, but they were not charged with any crimes, they were not given access to a lawyer, and their families were not notified of their whereabouts. Why the designation of “
unlawful enemy combatant”? That’s the designation given by the Bush administration to anyone for whom they want to deny all legal and human rights. Though patently illegal under international law, Bush and his henchmen believe that the designation gives them some kind of excuse to do whatever they please with their prisoners.
Why is it so important to deny these prisoners access to a courtroom, lawyers, or their family? Jane Mayer, in her book, “
The Dark Side – The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals”, explains why. Because of the Bush administration’s penchant for abusing and torturing their prisoners, any lifting of the veil of secrecy is likely to embarrass them.
It all started with the first prisoner in George Bush’s “War on Terror”, John Walker Lindh, otherwise known as “The American Taliban”. At Lindh’s trial, numerous incidents of procedural misconduct came to light, and subsequently Lindh’s lawyer obtained a plea bargain whereby Lindh pleaded guilty to one non-terrorist related crime in return for the government dropping the other nine counts. Mayer describes the lessons that the Bush administration learned from its first prosecution of a “terrorist”:
What John Walker Lindh taught the Bush Administration was that open criminal trials under the strict rules of the American legal system were not worth the risk (of embarrassment to the Bush administration that is). In the future, enemy prisoners would have to be held safely outside the reach of U.S. law, where they could by questioned without legal interference and tried under rules more favorable to the prosecution – if they were tried at all.
But due to constant and aggressive pressure from civil rights organizations, the Bush administration was forced to make various concessions. After being held at Guantanamo without charges for almost two years, in 2003 the Bush administration was finally forced to reassess the status of the Uyghurs. The result was that the “unlawful enemy combatant” label was withdrawn from 15 of them, and they were cleared to go.
But they weren’t released. Nor were they even informed that they had been cleared of terrorism charges.
October 4th, 2008 court order to release the Uyghur detaineesWhy weren’t the Uyghurs released after their “unlawful enemy combatant” status was withdrawn? The first reason that they weren’t released is that they would likely be executed or tortured or both if they were returned to China, and the Bush administration couldn’t find another country that would accept them. But why then couldn’t they be released into the United States?
Initially, the Bush administration presented no answer to that question. Consequently, lawyers for the detainees took the case to the District Court for the District of Columbia, to obtain their release. Subsequently, on October 4th, Judge Ricardo Urbina ordered their release.
An
e-mail that I recently received from
Amnesty International (AI) explained Judge Urbina’s reasoning:
Judge Urbina pointed out that it was the government that had taken the Uyghurs to Guantanamo; had not charged them with any crime or presented any "reliable evidence that they would pose a threat to US interests"; and it is the government that has "stymied" its own efforts to find a third country solution by labeling the Uyghurs until recently as "enemy combatants". Judge Urbina also noted that there were individuals and organizations ready and willing to support the Uyghurs upon resettlement in the USA "by providing housing, employment, money, education and other spiritual and social services".
Judge Urbina had asked the government what threat the Uyghurs would pose if released into the USA, but the government did not produce any evidence of such a threat.
Consequently, a U.S. Court of Appeals judge noted that:
The government had presented "no evidence" that the Uyghurs pose a threat to the US national security "or the safety of the community or any person". She added that the fact that one or more of the Uyghurs received training in firearms "cannot alone show they are dangerous, unless millions of United States resident citizens who had received firearms training are deemed to be dangerous".
Bush administration refusal to obey Judge Urbina’s court orderSubsequently, to avoid complying with the order of the District Court, the Bush administration
obtained an emergency stay from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to continue to detain the prisoners, pending their review of the case. The Bush administration has made several points in defense of their position:
The Imperial Presidency argument:
The US administration argues that Judge Urbina's order should be reversed because "unless otherwise authorized by law, no court has the power to review the Executive’s decision to exclude an alien from this country".
The “Uyghurs are dangerous” argument:
Now, in its bid to have the order overturned, it has portrayed the Uyghurs as dangerous individuals, who "sought to wage terror on a sovereign government" and who had received "weapons training" in Afghanistan after they fled there from China.
The immigration law / “national security” argument:
The government argues that even if the Uyghurs "were standing at the Nation's borders", they would likely not be allowed in on security grounds, under the broadly worded US immigration law.
And lastly, the Bush administration argues that releasing the Uyghurs into the U.S. could complicate its efforts to find another country to accept them. Amnesty International has an answer to that last argument:
The fact is, however, that any such efforts by the US State Department – unsuccessful for years – have already been undermined by the government’s own conduct – its prior labeling of the detainees as "enemy combatants" and its more recent campaign of innuendo labeling them as dangerous.
Conditions under which the Uyghurs are held at Guantanamo BayAI described the conditions under which the Uyghurs are currently detained:
In its briefs to the Court of Appeals, the government has painted a benign picture of the conditions in which the Uyghurs are now "housed"…
But while the Uyghurs' current conditions are less harsh than those they have endured previously… they are isolated from the outside world, surrounded by fencing and razor wire, monitored by armed guards and 24-hour camera surveillance, and with only a small space for recreation. They are shackled to the floor for visits with lawyers.
With respect to the last statement: One of the Uyghurs’ lawyers, after finally being allowed access to his clients, in later court testimony described one of his clients as “chained to the floor in a box with no windows”.
This is, however, a great improvement over the conditions under which they had previously been detained for several years.
Why is the Bush administration really so intent on continuing to imprison innocent people?We don’t know for sure what the real reason is for the indefinite and illegal detention of the Uyghurs. But some clues are evident in a 58-page
court filing of December 2006, by the Uyghurs’ lawyers. In that document the lawyers argued first that the Bush administration had never produced any evidence to suggest that the Uyghurs were guilty of anything, or any other evidence to support their continued detention. Furthermore:
The lawyers… allege in the court documents that their clients' detention was one of several demands the Chinese government solicited in mid-2002 as the United States was seeking global support for toppling Saddam Hussein…
“In the crisis atmosphere of the time, the interests of a few dozen refugees paled beside the urgency of the Administration's war plans," the lawsuit said. "The Iraq deal sealed the fate of the seven petitioners here. More than four years have passed. Long-discarded pawns in a diplomatic match between superpowers, petitioners today remain illegally imprisoned at Guantanamo."
Statements made by then Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage regarding his discussions with Chinese officials in 2002 lend considerable support to the allegations of the Uyghurs’ lawyers.
Concluding remarksThis whole situation, though typical of Bush administration actions connected with its “War on Terror”, absolutely reeks of Orwellian doublespeak and manipulation and disregard for the rule of law and human rights: The Bush administration received the Uyghurs from bounty hunters in 2001 and, rather than investigate the appropriateness of their detention, simply classified them all as “unlawful enemy combatants”, in order to justify their indefinite detention without charges, under inhumane conditions devoid of any human rights. Almost two years later, after being forced to review their status, the Bush administration cleared the majority of them of terrorist related activity and withdrew their label of “unlawful enemy combatant” – but continued to hold them in detention. After receiving a court order to release the detainees to the United States, in order to avoid complying with that order, the Bush administration applied for and received an emergency stay, based on claims that: 1) The Bush administration is not required to comply with court orders on this subject; 2) Though the Uyghurs have not been charged with any crime after almost 7 years of detention, they are nevertheless too dangerous to be released; 3) Releasing them into our country would violate our immigration laws and jeopardize our national security; and 4) Releasing them into the United States would jeopardize the Bush administration’s efforts to find another country to take them in – efforts which have been unsuccessful after 7 years of effort (or non-effort).
As bad as this is, it is not at all atypical of George Bush’s “War on Terror”. Though we have repeatedly been told that George Bush’s “War on Terror” prisoners are “
the worst of the worst”, the facts tell a very different story: An
investigation of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal concluded that “A lack of proper screening meant that many innocent Iraqis were being detained (in some cases indefinitely) and that 60% of civilian prisoners at Abu Ghraib were deemed not to be a threat to society”; The
International Red Cross said that between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake; a
study of our Guantanamo Bay detainees, using our government’s own records, found that 60% of our detainees at Guantanamo were thrown into prison for an indefinite period of time without charges or trial merely because they were claimed to be “associated with” a group or groups that our government asserts to be a terrorist organization (only 8% were deemed to be associated with al Qaeda), and; a CIA intelligence analyst who was summoned to Guantanamo Bay to discover why the CIA was able to obtain so little useful information from its detainees:
concluded that an estimated one third of the prison camp’s population of more than 600 captives… had no connection to terrorism whatsoever. If the intelligence haul was meager, his findings suggested, one reason was that many of the detainees knew little or nothing… Many, he felt sure, “were just caught in a dragnet. They were not fighters… They should not have been there…. By imprisoning innocent Muslims indefinitely, outside the reach of any legal review", he said, “I thought we were going to lose a whole damn generation” in the Arab world… Guantanamo was making the world more dangerous…"
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