Pen/Insular_Notes

I realised yesterday that I’d let the first birthday (Dec 17) of this blog pass without even noticing, my mind was obviously too caught up in what was happening in Hong Kong. I had kind of thought I might call it a day after a year, but I don’t know, this blogging thing is vaguely addictive. We’ll see how things go, but real life is catching up with me relentlessly nonetheless.

Anyway, as a late birthday treat (?) I’ll update the first post I wrote here. It concerned the unfortunate Chinese Muslims, Uighurs in fact, who were locked up at Guantanamo Bay at King George’s pleasure. Well, perhaps not too surprisingly, they’re still there one year on, rotting in their tropical jail, while the US government decides, interminably, what to do with them.

There are still at least 15 Uighur prisoners at Guantanamo and the latest news I could find on them is in this Washington Post article from last week. It focuses specifically on the strange and tragic story of Saddiq Ahmad Turkistani, a Saudi Uighur who was apparently locked up by the Taliban for allegedly being part of a plot to kill Osama Bin Laden. He was freed by the Americans when they arrived in Kandahar in 2001, but then in an unexplained twist he ended up being taken to Guantanamo, where he has remained ever since. He has now been officially cleared of being an ‘enemy combatant’ along with the other Uighurs, but the US still has no solution as to where to send them. In fact, a total of 15 of the Uighurs were cleared for release about two years ago, but have been in limbo at Camp Delta ever since. Ironically, a country that is now known to engage in various types of torture will not send these people back to China for fear that they might be tortured. Third countries like Sweden and Finland have so far refused to take them.

This does of course, beg the question of why the US itself won’t take in these innocent and rather badly wronged men, as their lawyer suggests in this Boston Post article from last week. The article also notes that a US federal judge is considering ordering some of the Uighur prisoners be brought to the US to his courtroom. Whether or not this judge will actually be allowed to release any of these prisoners into the US is another matter - the Bush Administration previously tried to block his attempt to get them released into the care of the Uighur-American community in July. You sort of get the impression that the US government is anxious for them not to come to the US at all costs, perhaps due to the possible bad PR that could arise from public airing of the things they know about Guantanamo (like the fact that some of them are still treated as dangerous prisoners and chained to the floor of a windowless box). Perhaps also because the Bush administration knows that even if the Chinese Muslims weren’t angry, pissed off young America-haters before, they certainly will be now.

The Washington Post has another in-depth story on the Uighur prisoners from back in August that is worth reading, and the paper also has a list of all known Guantanamo detainees. This is interesting in itself as the US government will not reveal who is actually detained at Camp Delta, so this list has been gleaned from various reports etc and many of the people there still remain unknown and un-named.