According to a new report from Bloomberg former and current administration officials say thatsome of the 17 Chinese Muslim Uighurs who have been held at Guantanamo will be released in the United States.
The fate of the Chinese nationals, who were captured after the Sept. 11 attacks, has been a quandary for U.S. officials. While the Bush administration cleared the Uighurs for release or transfer between 2003 and 2008, the government hasn’t been able to find a country willing to accept them....
"It’s a virtual certainty that the Obama administration will announce at some point that some small number of Uighurs will be settled in the United States," said John B. Bellinger III, a State Department legal adviser during the Bush administration who is now a partner at the law firm Arnold & Porter LLP in Washington. "It’s going to be impossible to get European counties to agree to resettle any detainees unless we take some."...
The U.S. has convened a multiagency task force to review each of the Guantanamo detainees to determine whether they should be released, tried in court or held indefinitely. The Justice Department, which is leading the review, won’t comment on where the Uighurs may be released, said spokesman Dean Boyd.
The government "is making individual determinations on a rolling basis, based on the national-security and foreign- policy interests of the United States as well as the interests of justice," Boyd said in an e-mail.
The U.S. Marshals Service was preparing to transfer two Uighurs to Northern Virginia last month, and more were supposed to follow, according to a Justice Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity. The plan was intended as a gesture to help convince allies to accept detainees, the official said.
The transfer didn’t happen. Representative Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, raised objections with the administration about the plan and sent Obama a letter on May 1, saying he understood that a decision on the release of "a number" of Uighurs into the U.S. was imminent.
This should happen, and it should happen soon, for a number of reasons that include building up some goodwill with our allies who we need to have assist us in resettling the more than 100 detainees who the administration has determend should be released.
It also needs to happen because the situation at Guanatanamo is becoming increasingly tense. The apparent suicide Monday of Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, a 31-year-old Yemeni, is just a symptom of the growing frustration among detainees.
In Obama's less than five months in office, the U.S. military has opened communal spaces and started building a new classroom in the prison, and some cell blocks now have satellite television, DVDs and wireless headphones. But nearly half the detainees are still locked up alone for most of the day, and one of every eight prisoners is on hunger strike.
Shane Kadidal, who meets with detainees as an attorney with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, said expectations for dramatic change have ebbed. He said prisoners know that only two prisoners have been released since Obama took office, compared with more than 500 under the administration of former President George W. Bush.
"They're saying, 'At least Bush sent some people home,'" he said.
Some inmates report an increase in hostilities as guards clash with inmates counting down the months to the January deadline.
"Oppression has increased," wrote Adnan Latif, a Yemeni detainee, in an April letter shortly before he slashed his wrist while meeting his attorney. "The best thing that I can hope for is death."
The release of at least a handful of the detainees, and in the U.S., might help quell some of that tension. It would also likely prove to American politicians that we won't all be murdered in our beds should some of these detainees be relocated into the U.S.--particularly the majority that would end up in U.S. military or federal prisons. The Uighurs in particular are likely to post no harm to any community in which they were resettled, because of the potential threat of repartriation to China.
If the administration is truly considering this move, they would be advised to do it sooner rather than later. It would provide an excellent follow-up to President Obama's Muslim nation goodwill visit.