US Judge Ricardo Urbina Upsets Bombastic BushCo’s Applecart
8th October 2008
by This Old Brit
Judge orders Chinese Muslims freed from Gitmo
Chinese, Muslim, Islamofascist terrorists?
Well, well, well. We do declare.
Hands up who knew.
Did you?
WASHINGTON (CNN) — A federal judge has ordered the immediate release into the United States of 17 Chinese Muslims who have been held for several years in the U.S. military facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.A
U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina on Tuesday ordered the 17 detainees to appear in his Washington courtroom at 10 a.m. Friday and said he would hold a hearing next week to determine under what conditions they will be settled in the United States.The government late Tuesday afternoon announced it would file papers shortly with an appeals court seeking an emergency stay to stop the judge’s order in its tracks.
The detainees are ethnic Uighurs, from a mostly Muslim autonomous region in western China.
They have been in government custody for seven years and have been cleared for release for the past four years to any country willing to take them. No countries have volunteered.
The judge, visibly impatient, told government lawyers he wants no delays.
“There is a pressing need for them to be released,” Urbina declared.
And, good old Judge Ricardo flatly refused to let the matter rest, even at that.
“I have issued an order. I do not want these people interfered with in any way,” the judge said.
Read the rest of this (sorta semi-refreshing), report right here.
(Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It)
October 9th, 2008 at 1:26 am
Well, they’ve admitted to receiving weapons training from the Taliban in Afghanistan, are considered terrorists in China and no other country in the world wants them running around there either.
Maybe your buddy Ricky will release them into your custody?
October 9th, 2008 at 6:57 am
They were probably tortured before they admitted to that. McCain admitted to war crimes after he was tortured. And China considers anyone who works for justice or human rights a terrorist. Again, this all could have been avoided if Bush had followed a simple rule back in 2002: if you don’t have any evidence that a person committed a crime or fought against the US, you have to let them go.
October 9th, 2008 at 9:23 am
One of the unfortunate side effects of the War on Terror is that it gave China cover to crack down more severely on Uighur separatists, who for the most part had not been violent. And of course, when the Chinese squeeze them harder, more Uighurs will turn to violence, playing right into the evil Muslim stereotype.
Unlike the Tibetans, who have the Dalai Lama as a visible and well liked spokesperson, the Uighurs don’t have a public face. The Uighurs are in a situation comparable to the Tibetans, but because they’re Muslims and 99% of the American public probably don’t even know they exist, nobody cares about them.
As an aside, in the late 19th century, the Uighurs petitioned the British to be made a protectorate of the British Empire so that they would not have to be reincorporated into Manchu China. They had briefly reclaimed their independence when China was rocked by the Taiping Rebellion and other internal upheavals. But once the Manchus had put down the Taiping, they were able to set their sights on restoring control over Eastern Turkestan.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Americans aren’t the only ones who haven’t heard of them. I was chatting with a Chinese friend of mine who was living in the UK at the time, and when I mentioned the Uighur separatists she had no idea what I was talking about.
March 28th, 2009 at 2:55 am
[…] Urbina last year issued an order freeing some Chinese Muslims from Guantanamo, and for which he caught hell from Israeli supporters, the chirping in our […]