Palau is going to take the Gitmo Uighurs off our hands for not much more than ten million dollars each.
This is idiotic.
[Thursday morning update]
…the plan is, apparently, to take Islamists who are driven into violent rages by the sight of a woman with bare arms and let them go in a country full of beaches where “natives often go topless.”
The country’s in the very best of hands.
[Bumped]
Crap, I’d house them for less than that!
Didn’t they shoot a season of “Survivor” there? Maybe Jeff Probst can be sent over and they can start a whole new reality show
This seems mighty close to slavery to me.
It boils down to whether they’re guests or “guests.”
They are undocumented aliens, and are also stateless persons.
Or, we could hand them over to the government of their state or origin — China.
Which do you prefer, Al, them frolicking in Palau, or rotting in a Chinese jail?
I didn’t see “frolicking” mentioned. And the Chinese would simply shoot them.
If we’re going to outsource the detention, and -pay- for it, a torture-free Guantanamo would be preferred.
Except that the Uighurs are no longer detainees.
They are going to Palau for two reasons:
1. They are stateless persons.
2. The US Congress (Democrats control both houses) screamed bloody murder at the prospect of the Uighurs getting resettled in US territory.
3. The government of Palau has accepted them for resettlement.
4. I never claimed to count accurately.
Isn’t our imprisonment of innocent men for 7 years a bigger deal than what it’s costing to resettle them?
Innocent? If they were training with AQ, then I don’t see them as innocent. I see them as terrorists. I think they should have been turned over to China, for execution.
After WW2, a tens of thousands of legitimate POWs and refuges were turned over to the Soviet authorities by the Allies. A large percentage spent 10 years in labor camps and many died there. Yet you barely hear a peep about it now.
Fast forward to today. We can’t even send 13 Chinese AQ terrs back to China because they might be mistreated. Instead, we spend a huge amount of money to send them away, and believe me, 7 years from now HBO will be making movies about the terrible injustice done to those folks anyway.
The point is, if we hand them to the commies, a few people will whine now, but in the long run nobody is going to get upset and complain. It would reflect badly upon our leftist Kapitalist Komrads.
China is insisting that we turn the Uighurs over to them:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090611/ap_on_re_au_an/as_us_palau_guantanamo
Works for me.
Except that international “law” is different in 2009 than it was in 1945/6.
Jim,
Try to wrap your mind around this concept: War is not subject to civilian criminal law, no matter how much many try to obfuscate it. The Uighurs were not criminal suspects, but suspected unlawful combatants. After a military proceeding, they were determined to be otherwise (for whatever reason).
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To everyone else…
Without documentation proving that they are Chinese citizens, what does one do with them? They are stateless persons.
Furthermore, it is not evident to me (perhaps out of ignorance) that these Uighurs are driven to violent rages at the sight of a bare-armed woman. Can someone convince me that Uighurs are the same frothing at the mouth Wahabists that Al Qaeda and Taliban types are?
Try to wrap your mind around this concept: War is not subject to civilian criminal law, no matter how much many try to obfuscate it.
Law is what we make it. We have habeus corpus because the power to indefinitely detain someone based on a suspicion is ripe for abuse. This is true whether it’s inside one’s borders or not, in peacetime and in war.
The Uighurs were not criminal suspects, but suspected unlawful combatants.
The Uighurs were not participants in the war in question; they were innocent bystanders. We’ve known this for years. We screwed up in detaining them in the first place. If they want to live in the U.S. we should let them; it’s the least we can do.
Jim – Innocent bystanders? What on Earth? How could you possibly have evidence to that effect?
David:
Innocent bystanders? What on Earth? How could you possibly have evidence to that effect?
Have you read much about the Uighurs? No one thinks they are guilty of harming or planning to harm U.S. interests. You can start by clicking my name for one article.