"Growing up under communism," he said, "we always dreamed of living in peace and working in free society like this one. Today you have let freedom ring."
I don't know if Abdul Nasser understood the many faceted and deep ironies contained in his few words, given in response to his and three of his fellow detainees' release from Guantanamo, nearly eight years after his capture, and five years after being cleared for release. Mr. Nasser, 32, along with Huzaifa Parhat, 38, Abdul Semet, 32, and Jalal Jalaladin, 29 were flown out of Guantanamo yesterday to Bermuda, where they have guest worker permits. The remaining Uighurs are likely to be settled in Palau, Australia, and potentially Germany, but those negotiations remain problematic.
There were a few other developments on the Guantanamo issue yesterday.
Congressional Democrats yesterday reached agreement on a war-funding bill that would allow detainees to be sent to the United States for trial. The draft bill included no provision for prolonged detention without trial, a step that President Obama has said will be necessary to incarcerate detainees who are too dangerous to release but who cannot be prosecuted....
Two other Guantanamo detainees, an Iraqi and a Chadian, were released and arrived in their countries yesterday. The Chadian, Mohammed El Gharani, was the youngest detainee at Guantanamo. He was 14 when he was picked up in Pakistan in 2001 and turned over to U.S. authorities.
"It could be a big week for Gitmo," said a second administration official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, adding that there is a possibility that as many as four more detainees could be transferred in the next couple of days. The administration is also finalizing a deal with Saudi Arabia to accept some of the nearly 100 Yemenis who are among the 232 detainees remaining at Guantanamo, U.S. and Saudi officials said....
Obama said recently that 50 detainees have been cleared for release as part of an ongoing review of each detainee's case. Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said the number cleared for release is now "substantially higher" than 50, but he was not able to provide an exact number.
Negotiations among our allies have been significantly compromised by the refusal of the United States to accept any of the detainess, but particulalry the Uighurs.
[State Department special envoy Daniel] Fried also negotiated with Germany, which has a Uighur population in Munich. But Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble balked at any transfer and pointedly asked U.S. officials why they were not accepting the Uighurs themselves if, as they insisted, they were not dangerous, according to German reports.
According to Sarah Mendelson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who authored a report on closing Guantanamo, "Once it becomes clear no detainees will be settled in the U.S., potentially you could hear doors slamming all over Europe."
The diplomatic pressure that the administration is putting on our allies should be in part focused on our Congress. The resettlement of at least a few of the Uighurs in the United States, to a community in Northern Virginia that is willing and ready to sponsor them, would go a very long way toward building good faith abroad, and securing the assistance of other countries in helping resettle the detainees who cannot and should not be held as criminals.