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(Cross-posted at Registan.net)
Steve LeVine got Sean Roberts—who has studied the Uighurs of Xinjiang for the better part of two decades—to write a guest post on the Guantanamo Uighurs:
Particularly discouraging is how little U.S. politicians actually know about the Uyghurs despite it being seven years since we essentially identified them as enemies in the war on terror.
His post really needs to be read in full. The way the U.S. has treated the Uighurs in Guantanamo—with a mixture of racism, assumption, and illegality, now mixed with outright xenophobia and ignorance in Congress—is, in many ways, a microcosm for how it’s conducted the war in Afghanistan until very recently.
Think of the story of Captain Kirk Black, who has been trying to resolve the complaints over the arrest of a man in Ghazni named Gul Khan. The U.S. authorities think he has a relationship with Qari Idris, a local Taliban commander—his relatives and friends dispute that and claim the U.S. is detaining an innocent man. As CPT Black sought to investigate the merits of the case—doing something the interrogators at Bagram apparently hadn’t done by speaking with Khan’s relatives—Black’s superiors forced him to drop the case and not discuss it with reporters.
Remarkably, that demonstrates an improvement in how the Coalition treats detainees at Bagram (there are no longer any more fatal beatings at the prison, at least as far as we know).
But, as Roberts reports, the entirety of the scare-mongering about the Uighurs specifically is just bizarre:
When one looks at all of this evidence (or lack there of), it is difficult to understand how the United States decided to place ETIM on a list of dangerous terrorist groups to begin with. Was this, in fact, a political act of appeasement to the Chinese government? Are there other groups on this list from elsewhere in the world that were likewise included among our enemies in the war on terror under dubious circumstances?
Undoubtedly, it is time to release the Guantanamo Uyghurs. In doing so, however, it may also be time to review our intelligence on ETIM and other alleged terrorist groups we are targeting in the war on terror, even indirectly through such methods as financial sanctions.
In all likelihood such a review will find that much of our intelligence on alleged terrorist groups like ETIM comes from foreign intelligence organizations in countries with a conflict of interest. It has not been a secret that we have increasingly relied on collaboration with intelligence services of tenuous allies in the war on terror, such as China, Russia, the Central Asian states, and Pakistan. Can such intelligence be trusted to help the United States decide who is our enemy?
Unfortunately, encouraging too much critical thinking, even among the current administration, is something of a losing game.
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I think its pretty clear that declaring the Uighurs as terrorists was in fact an appeasment for China. They were and are in point of fact political prisoners. The only good thing is that Harry Reid has walked back some of his other words and now come out and said that the Uighurs might be allowed into America. Not saying I have any faith in him being able to herd cats in the Democratic caucus, but at the least it signifies to me that he has finally educated himself about who they are and who they aren’t. I would hope that Jim Webb who had a very dissapointing showing on one of the Sunday shows a couple of weeks ago will similarly get himself aquainted with the facts.
“Are there other groups on this list from elsewhere in the world that were likewise included among our enemies in the war on terror under dubious circumstances?“
Oh boy, are there ever!
I mean, yeah, an ingenue act is a good persuasion technique, but there are limits.
sgwhiteinfla wrote:
I don’t think that’s why they got picked up in the Balkans. That looks like a total FUBAR by somebody who was on some sort of round-em-up kick and maybe had a quota to fill to make some higher-ups happy. But once they got into the Gitmo system, yeah, it looks like keeping things smooth with China, while not releasing them back to China, has been a major factor in how screwed up their treatment has been.
As for how we treat folks we pick up in Afghanistan. Sure, we’ll have to rely to some extent on the folks we’re working with. And that means that, first cut of sorting through the intel, we’ll have to take some of it at face value. But we should be instiutionalizing safeguards that get people processed and released when possible.
Right now, too much of the system, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, operates on the default that the detainee is a bad guy. Perhaps it can’t operate completely like a criminal justice system with a presumption of innocence, but the balance of presumption needs to be reset somewhat in favor of the detainee. Especially when there’s independent info that calls into question whether we’ve got the right guy.
The failure of the state to render justice in a timely a fair fashion is one of the constant complaints we hear in stories of ordinary folks in both Afghanistan and the areas of Pakistan where the Taliban has been moving in. These sorts of tales, where the US is seen as acting in an arbitrary and callous fashion, and where ordinary folk have no recourse, is doing our cause an enormous amount of harm. It’s the sort of thing that eats at people, makes them see the US as an occupying army, and erodes good will towards or sense of legitimacy of the Afghan government.
Yeah, in some ways I think the argument over indefinite/preventative/prolonged detention or whatever we call it tomorrow is being poorly waged by the opponents. Civil libertarians see the fight in domestic terms (the danger that the president could detain Americans for political reasons), but the real problems are in international terms. Nobody wants to cooperate with somebody who claims a right to lock them up without trial. That applies both to locals in the theater as well as potential allies in Europe. This could be a real cost that sets back our wars.
Not to mention that the lack of transparency makes foreign manipulation easier–either in how we were pressured by China, or in how some Europeans suspect their governments were pressured by America. Much like how offshore outsourcing in the corporate world allows companies to evade domestic regulations, all of our back-and-forth renditions of people place to place let governments point fingers at each other when citizens disappear.
Exactly I’ve been wanting to scream from the rooftops about this. And then there are the hearings. Seems noone is paying attention to the fact that 22 men had to sit in Gitmo all because the Bush administration made this “concession” to the Mainland Chinese.