Just in case that deal with Palau falls through, I'd like Secretary of State Clinton to know my northeast Los Angeles neighborhood would be willing to do business with Washington under the same parameters they offered those islanders. Give us $200 million and I am pretty sure I can persuade the majority of residents here in Lincoln Heights to accept the 13 Uyghurs still being held at the Guantánamo detention center more than seven years after they were captured in Afghanistan.
Now it's true that I've only polled my wife and stepdaughter and the six neighbors who got together for barbecue last evening. But they're 100% behind the idea. A good move for ZIP Code 90031. And while the vast majority of Americans seem appalled by the idea of any Gitmo detainees hanging around near them - even if locked down in a supermax prison built to hold the worst of the worst - I think folks in this mostly low-income neighborhood can be persuaded without too much trouble. [You can click to enlarge that map of 90031 on the right.]
After all, a couple hundred mil would go a long way toward improving things in this area where one of the oldest, toughest gangs in the city resides and household income is less than half the state median.
In fact, I think the Secretary ought to phone up Palau President Johnson Toribiong today and tell him, sorry, the deal's off.
Don't get me wrong. I hold no grudges against the Palauans. I'm sure they're all wonderfully mellow people and everything, and I really like their flag, but they're already living in paradise and now they want to get paid for it, too? C'mon. Lincoln Heights will take the 13 Uyghurs, and even the four who were moved to Bermuda Wednesday if things don't work out there.
In case you're unfamiliar with the story, let me summarize. Palau, a tropical archipelago east of the Philippines, has offered to accept some prisoners from Gitmo. In return, the country, which had been owned by various empire builders for centuries but has been politically independent since 1994, gets those extra millions in development aid.
The Uyghurs are the West China separatists who the United States has kept in judicial limbo since 2001. They were apparently in Afghanistan for firearms training when their camp was bombed during the U.S. invasion. They never took part in any fighting.
After living shackled to the floor of their Gitmo cells for several years, it was ultimately determined that the Uyghurs weren't a threat, had never been a threat, and ought never to have been shipped to that purloined piece of Cuba and imprisoned in the first place. That determination didn't stop them from continuing to be shackled. When five of them filed writs of habeas corpus in Qassim v. Bush, the Cheney-Bush administration evaded the issue by twisting arms in Albania, which accepted them as refugees.
That left 17 Uyghurs locked up at Gitmo. Not charged with any crime. Without judicial recourse. Unpersons caught up in America's little gulag. Some of them still shackled to the floor. Some of them held for years in solitary confinement. Some of them, as we have recently learned, subjected to what clever Orwellians call "harsh interrogation techniques" while Chinese intelligence agents watched or, perhaps, participated. Then, a year ago today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Boumediene v. Bush that the Gitmo captives must be given access to the U.S. courts for habeas corpus purposes. Other rulings followed, and finally, last October, after they had spent nearly seven years in captivity, a federal judge said the Uyghurs must be released into the United States.
The Cheney-Bush administration, of course, didn't want to do that. Because it would set a precedent. Let a few Gitmo captives into the country, and the next thing you know there would be a deluge of them appearing on Oprah telling wild tales of abuse and in court demanding compensation for their mistreatment and sending their kids to our already overcrowded schools. Albania apparently couldn't be arm-twisted or bribed into taking more Uyghurs, especially since at least one of the ungrateful five had been so upset with life there that he moved to Sweden.
Just to prove that irony has been thoroughly demolished in the past eight years, the 17 couldn't be shipped back to their Chinese home, said a solemn Condoleeza Rice, because American law forbids repatriation of anyone to a country where they might be tortured. So Cheney-Bush punted the whole problem into the next administration's lap.
When President Obama's team started hinting that they might bring scores of Gitmo prisoners for trial in the United States, the most bizarre case ever of NIMBYism arose. Congresspeople (and many other Americans) who drool all over themselves at the prospect a new prison may be built in their districts, exclaimed: "No way!" What if they got loose? What if they radicalized other prisoners? What if al Qaeda launched a rescue mission? As for the notion of 17 Uyghurs actually walking free on American streets, joining other Uyghurs who have been here for years, a great shudder went up from the land.
So here is the U.S. offering tens of millions of dollars to some islanders who surely could use the money for all kinds of good things. But here in Lincoln Heights there also are needs. The truth is, if we accept the Uyghurs, we ought to be in line for $400 million. Palau's population is only 21,000, but there are 39,000 or so of us. No reason to wreck the deal by being pushy, however. Like the bottom quintile everywhere, we're used to doing more with less.
For example, because of draconian slashing of public budgets, neither the seven elementary schools nor one middle school in the area will hold summer-school classes this year. And the high school is limiting its summer classes to graduating seniors. That may sound great from the point of view of many kids. But not only do those classes help them keep up academically during the regular year, they also keep a lot of them from winding up in the back of a police cruiser and give relief to their parents. A slice of that $200 million could keep the classes running and some teachers and custodians off the unemployment rolls.
Budget cuts will also take their toll on anti-gang programs. As noted previously, one of the oldest and most notorious gangs in Los Angeles, the Avenidas, operates out of Lincoln Heights and an adjacent neighborhood. Their graffiti are only the most visible aspect of their toxic presence. Killings are not uncommon. Peel another few bills off that $200 million roll to keep anti-gang intervention operating. Including cleaning up that graffiti since the city's clean-up program is also due for the budget ax.
Our local recreation center, with its indoor and outdoor ball courts, computer classes, college-prep classes, activities for kids, teens and senior citizens, faces a still-undetermined cutback in hours. Which, of course, means those extra young people roaming the streets because they have no summer classes will also have limited options for burning off energy.
The percentage of neighorhood residents without health insurance but too much income to qualify for California's version of Medicaid, adds to the already spectacular burden on local emergency rooms. Some of that $200 mil could be used experimentally. We could set up a low-fee clinic devoted to basic primary care, well-baby care, disease prevention, family planning, and advice about diet and exercise. That's the kind of set-up the whole city, the whole state, the whole country ought to have. Use some of that money so Lincoln Heights can be a testing ground.
As for the Uyghurs, they'll get along fine here. A few Muslims are in the neighborhood already, including the one that lives in my house. She can show them how to take public transportation to one of the three nearby mosques. We'll get them into some decent housing - prices have dropped 35% in the past two years, and the growing number of foreclosures are taking them even lower. Realtors are eager to deal. We'll enroll the Uighurs in ESL and vocational classes. Maybe give them a loan to set up another of those hybrid Los Angeles restaurants serving, say, Uyghur-Salvadoran food. One of the five Albanian Uyghurs now works as a chef. Surely there's a book deal awaiting one of them. Soon some of their fellow Uighurs living elsewhere in the United States or Canada may decide to move here. They'll get married and their offspring will drive them crazy by dating and marrying people named Jackson and Jiménez and Jiao.
So, think about us here in Lincoln Heights, Secretary Clinton. True, we don't have the advantage of being 7000 miles away and out of sight in remote Palau. But like many urban American communities these days, ours is kind of invisible, gritting it out in an economy that for many here was pretty tough even before it went into recession. True, we're not a tropical paradise, although you can buy mangos and pineapples from freeway off-ramp vendors every day. The Uyghurs would, I think, like it here. You could at least let them try it out for a couple of months.