Vicious Rants of an Angry Yellow Man

A few days ago the LA Times had an editorial which supported the release of 17 Uighurs detained at Guantanamo Bay. The Uighurs are Chinese Muslims of Turkic origin from western China. They were detained while they were in Pakistan in 2002 after having received firearm training in Afghanistan. It is obvious that they were not enemy combatants against the U.S. as the Bush administration had claimed. I have advocated from the beginning that we should not detain people who are not our enemy lest they and the family they had left behind will become our enemies in the future. Now the cases are going through the courts with civil rights group demanding that the government let these detainees be released into the U.S. and receive political asylum. I don't think this is a good idea even though I admit that I see no good way of solving this problem myself. I just wished that the Bush administration would not have detained these people in the first place!

The Uighurs would obviously face harsh treatment if they are returned to China. They were training to be potential terrorists in Afghanistan. No other country wants to take them in now because nobody wants to anger China. If we give them political asylum we certainly would anger China. I mean if China had caught someone training to attack the U.S., would we not want to have him extradicted to the U.S.? The fact that the Uighurs are an oppressed minority in China does not excuse them from training to attack China. Someone's freedom fighter is someone else's terrorist.

Besides angering China, which may mean they will not cooperate with us against terrorism in the future, we have to consider whether these Uighurs are dangerous if released into our society. They were obviously ready to use force against China for whatever injustice they faced in China. Were those injustices worse than spending 7 years in jail? They had no reason to attack the U.S. in 2002 but what about now after we deprived them of their freedom for 7 years? So if we release them into our country, we anger China and we have to watch our back for 17 trained foreigners who spent 7 years in our prison. If we sent them back to China they will be punished severely for crimes that they have yet to committ, after we had imprisoned them for 7 years. What a mess!