“The Worst Of The Worst”

The last three of 22 Uighur detainees, held at Gitmo for over ten years despite the government’s knowledge of their innocence, have been freed after Slovakia agreed to repatriate them. Serwer explains how domestic politics enabled this miscarriage of justice:

“Let’s be clear: these terrorists would not be held in prisons but released into neighborhoods,” [Republican Congressman Frank] Wolf said. “They should not be released at all into the United States. Do members realize who these people are? There have been published reports that the Uighurs were members of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, a designated terrorist organization affiliated with Al Qaeda.” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said the Uighurs “instructed by the same terrorists responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.” He then urged Obama to send them back to China. One of the prisoners responded to Gingrich through their attorney: ”Why does he hate us so much?”

A U.S. federal court had ruled in 2008 that the detention of the Uighurs was baseless and that they were not terrorists or “enemy combatants” – something that, according to [Daniel] Klaidman, the government had already known for at least five years. The court also questioned the government’s designation of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement as an ally of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, which Mother Jones’ Stephanie Mencimer writes was motivated by the Bush administration’s desire to shore up Chinese support for the invasion of Iraq, itself based on a falsehood. Judge Ricardo Urbina, who ordered the Uighurs be resettled in the U.S. in 2008 after determining they posed no threat to America (a ruling later blocked at the request of the Obama administration) told the Miami Herald that “there was not a shred of evidence that they were disliked by anyone — anyone but the Chinese government.” Don’t forget Wolf and Gingrich.

Our allies weren’t very helpful either:

The Bush Administration contacted more than 100 countries, almost all of whom refused to help either because they did not want to help the Bush Administration for political reasons, or because of Chinese threats to cut off trade relations.  If other countries had been more willing to help close Guantanamo (rather than simply to criticize the United States), the Uighurs would have been released long ago.  The Obama Administration’s first Guantanamo Envoy Dan Fried worked extremely hard to resettle the remaining Uighurs and succeeded in transferring another 14 in the Obama Administration’s first term.  In 2009, I wrote that it would be helpful to resettle at least some of the Uighurs in the United States; I continue to think that they would not have posed any more of a threat to this country than to the six countries that have agreed to take them. The sad story of the Uighurs demonstrates why the issues surrounding both the opening and the closure of Guantanamo are more complex than many critics believe. Cliff Sloan and Paul Lewis should receive bipartisan support in Congress for their efforts to reduce the detainee population at Guantanamo, and Obama Administration officials should resist the temptation to politicize their work.

But Ryan Cooper places the blame primarily on the GOP:

When it was clear even to the Bush administration—Bush himself said the prison should be closed—that these people had been rounded up by mistake, and they were being deprived of their freedom for no reason, the response of the demagogues—and eventually the entire Republican establishment, and most of the Democratic one, was to deny the administration the funding to close Guantánamo. Make no mistake, the Democrats are no heroes here. But publicly denouncing out-groups known to be innocent of any crime is one of the most evil things it is possible for a politician to do.