Uyghurs in Guantanamo

As rumors swirl, suggesting that a number of the remaining 13 Uighur prisoners in Guantánamo (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province) may soon be relocating to the tiny Pacific island state of Palau, a court case relating to nine of these men threatens to hurl a number of other prisoners in Guantánamo, who have also been [...]

In an exclusive interview with the BBC, Daniel Fried came across as an eminently reasonable man placed in a disturbingly unreasonable position by his bosses. A senior diplomat, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs for four years, Fried was plucked from his job in March 2009 to become the [...]

In the first part of this three-part series examining the Guantánamo prisoners’ attempts to secure their release via the US courts, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, examined the Bush administration’s record in the seven months after the Supreme Court’s ruling, in June 2008, that the prisoners had constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, and [...]

Four and a half months ago, 17 unjustly detained prisoners in Guantánamo wrote a letter to President Obama asking for their release. In the secretive world of Guantánamo, however, nothing is straightforward, and it has taken over four months for the letter to be cleared by the government’s censors and sent on to the White [...]

I’m pleased to report that Rushan Abbas, someone I greatly admire for her practical efforts to mitigate the brutal effects of the “War on Terror,” is profiled today on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, in an article entitled, “The Go-Between: Interpreting Life in Bermuda for Freed Gitmo Prisoners.”

Rushan Abbas (right) with Abdullah [...]

Last Thursday, while most US media outlets were focused relentlessly on the marathon endurance test that was Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing, the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights And Oversight held a hearing to investigate why the Bush administration had allowed Chinese interrogators to visit Guantánamo to interrogate the [...]

These accounts, from three Uighur prisoners released from Guantánamo, were submitted to a hearing last Thursday of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight. For a report on the hearing, see “House Threatens Obama Over Chinese Interrogation Of Uighurs In Guantánamo.”
Statement of Abu Bakker Qassim
I would like to provide [...]

Back in May, in an article entitled, “Guantánamo: A Real Uighur Slams Newt Gingrich’s Racist Stupidity,” I took exception to remarks that Gingrich, the former House Speaker, made about the Uighur prisoners in Guantánamo (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province), who managed to get the Bush administration, the military at Guantánamo and the US courts to [...]

I have just received disturbing information from several Uighur correspondents in the United States, regarding the “riots” that began just nine days ago in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of China.
When the unrest began, the world’s media suddenly discovered the story of the Uighurs, who describe their situation as akin [...]

In recent months, those who have been studying Guantánamo closely have come to the disturbing conclusion that the biggest obstacle to President Obama’s pledge to close Guantánamo by January 2010 comes not from the fearmongering and opportunistic politicians who recently voted to prohibit the use of any funds to release or to transfer prisoners to [...]