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Guantanamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies

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Guantánamo is full of bleak stories. How could it fail to be, when it is a vast failed experiment, a “terror prison” that contains few terrorists, a place where innocent men and foot soldiers from someone else’s war — never adequately screened to determine whether they actually constituted a threat to the United States — have been held for nearly seven years without charge or trial?

At present, some of Guantánamo’s bleakest stories are those of the Uyghurs (or Uighurs), refugees from Chinese oppression, who had sheltered in Afghanistan, and were seized and sold to US forces as they sought refuge in Pakistan after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

Last week, I told the story of the Uyghurs in Guantánamo, after the government admitted that it had no reason to regard them as “enemy combatants,” and Judge Ricardo Urbina, in the District Court in Washington D.C., ruled that their continued imprisonment was therefore unconstitutional, and that, because they cannot be returned to China, and no other country can be persuaded to take them, they should be released to the care of communities in Washington D.C. and Tallahassee, Florida, who submitted detailed plans for their welfare to the court.

For one proud moment, it looked as if justice would be done, but the Uyghurs were then hurled back into limbo, as the government appealed Judge Urbina’s ruling, shamelessly resuscitating its own long-discredited claims that the Uyghurs were “a danger to the public,” who had “admitted receiving weapons training at a military training camp.” Three appeals court judges granted the government a temporary stay, though with the hopeful caveat that it “should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits” of the government’s request.

Since the appeal, it has become apparent that the government’s stooges in the Justice Department are intent on keeping the Uyghurs in Guantánamo, as their false claims about the men have skewered the State Department’s chances of finding a third country to take them. As William Glaberson reported in the New York Times, an administration official, speaking anonymously, said that the State Department’s position was that the Justice Department’s appeal had “compromised diplomatic efforts” to persuade a third country to take the men. “Based on what they were saying in the brief, it made it impossible to conduct negotiations,” the official said.

Although the Justice Department refused to comment, Clint Williamson, the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for war crimes, who has fruitlessly been attempting to negotiate resettlement plans with other countries for several years, explained how the government’s bullish and unsubstantiated statements had scuppered his chances of finding a last minute solution to the problem. Speaking to the Times, he said, “I was scheduled to depart on another round of negotiations early this week. It was impossible to resolve some concerns we had about going forward at the time. As a result I canceled the trip.”

A decision on the government’s appeal is expected soon, but in the meantime the Uyghurs’ supporters in Tallahassee are still hoping that Judge Urbina’s ruling will be upheld. On October 1, 19 religious leaders — 16 Christians, a Rabbi and two Muslims — issued a statement, in which they declared their support for “an inter-faith effort to resettle three of the Uyghur prisoners currently held in federal custody at the facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,” and pledged that, “Should these men be paroled, we will offer our personal welcome and support, and will urge the faith communities with whom we are associated to offer spiritual, financial, and practical assistance for their resettlement and incorporation into the Tallahassee community.”

In a detailed plan, the Steering Committee of the Tallahassee Uyghur Resettlement Plan — a mixture of religious leaders and sympathetic professionals — arranged to locate an apartment for the men, secured them jobs in a local restaurant, arranged for English lessons and medical and psychiatric support, and raised money to fund the plan through a network already established to provide support to victims of Hurricane Katrina.

All of this was credited with helping persuade Judge Urbina that resettling the Uyghurs in the United States was feasible, and when Carol Rosenberg spoke to community leaders for the Miami Herald this week, she found that sympathy for the Uyghurs was widespread. Noting that their supporters “liken their plight to that of the Tibetans, without the benefit of a celebrity like the Dalai Lama to tell their story,” Rosenberg spoke to Brant Copeland, the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Tallahassee and a member of the Steering Committee. Copeland delivered an extraordinary sermon about the Uyghurs to his congregation last month (available here), describing their story and extolling the virtues of compassion, and he explained the Committee’s statement of support as follows:

It’s a pro-Jesus statement. Regardless of one’s political opinion, these are folks who were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they have been so unjustly imprisoned for seven years. This issue cuts across all the political agendas. It’s a pro-compassion statement. And a pro-Mohammed statement and a pro-Moses statement.

Rosenberg also spoke to civil rights attorney Kent Spriggs, who has represented several Afghan prisoners in Guantánamo. It was Spriggs who introduced the plan to community leaders in Tallahassee, explaining the Uyghurs’ story to Salah Bakhashwin, who spread the word through the city’s 3,000-member Muslim community. A Saudi by birth, Bakhashwin came to America at the age of 17, and told Rosenberg that he was “weary of the ‘guilt-by-association’ atmosphere toward Muslims that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.” He added, “We’re going to show the people of Tallahassee and Florida what happens when people of faith come together for the community good.” Another Saudi-born Tallahassee resident — a massage therapist — took on the role as leader of the host community, and when he told a Turkish-American businessman about it, the man guaranteed the Uyghurs jobs at his Italian restaurant chain. Another local, of Pakistani origin, found them an apartment near Tallahassee’s main mosque.

Rosenberg also spoke to other religious leaders. The Reverend John Lown, of the Lafayette Presbyterian Church, explained that he would “model the absorption program after his ’90s experience with the Northern Virginia Council of Churches resettling Bosnians and Ukrainians,” and Rabbi Jack Romberg, of the Reform movement’s Temple Israel, explained, “If indeed these people are found to be harmless, it’s only just that we find a way to take them in, get them on their feet and up and running as people who function in the community.” Rosenberg left the final word to Naeem Harris, the Imam of Tallahassee’s main mosque, who “has now embraced the idea that he will serve as spiritual leader” for the three Uyghurs. “Look at the good that can come from it,” Harris explained. “This can be an opportunity to show a lot of non-Muslims the real religion of Islam.”

To my eyes, the Tallahassee Uyghur Resettlement Plan is a glorious example of American generosity: a group of diverse individuals, acutely aware of their own background as immigrants and of the charitable obligations of their various religions, coming together to help a new group of immigrants in need. But I recall, of course, that the decision about the Uyghurs’ future rests not with the community leaders in Tallahassee or Washington D.C., but with judges who may be less in touch with their own roots as immigrants, and who may have forgotten that their own ancestors once fled injustice and persecution for the promise of America.

Welcome awaits Muslims from China held at Guantánamo

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Tallahassee is preparing to receive and look after three men on an improbable journey from Guantánamo Bay — and Tora Bora.

BY CAROL ROSENBERG
crosenberg@MiamiHerald.com

TALLAHASSEE — The Rev. Brant Copeland never heard of a Uighur before Guantánamo. Neither had Imam Naeem Harris, this city’s Muslim spiritual leader. Nor had Rabbi Jack Romberg.

Now the men have forged a community effort to settle three of the 17 Uighurs — men from a Muslim minority in China — whom a federal judge ruled were held for years in a legal limbo while mislabeled as enemies at the prison camps at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

At first blush, this southern capital city of 160,000 seems an unlikely destination for war-on-terror detainees from a faraway place: Spanish moss clings to centuries-old oak trees. The soundtrack at the airport plinks, Give Me That Old Time Religion.

The city has only two mosques, and not a single Uighur (pronounced WEE-gurr).

Still, people here are preparing to embrace the Uighurs, men who fled northwestern China in the ’90s. Restaurant kitchen jobs have been found, and an apartment awaits, along with healthcare and volunteers to carpool the men.

In doing so, the community plunged itself into a court battle between lawyers for the men who were captured by U.S. allies fleeing Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in 2001 and the Bush administration, which is fighting a judge’s order to release the men. An appeals court temporarily blocked the release last week.

”The executive branch has made a determination that these individuals . . . should not be admitted to the United States,” said Dean Boyd, a national security spokesman at the Department of Justice.

Boyd noted that, at Guantánamo, the men ”admitted receiving weapons training at military training camps” in Afghanistan.

U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina ruled for teams of U.S. lawyers who filed unlawful detention lawsuits. In a historic ruling, Urbina told the government Oct. 7 that unless a third country agrees to resettle them safely, the men must be brought to the United States. It was the first time a judge has ordered the release of a war-on-terror detainee onto U.S. soil.

The Uighurs have for years claimed through their lawyers that they admire American democracy and their dispute is with China.

They claimed they fled communist repression in Xinjiang, where Uighur insurgents have for years resisted Beijing’s rule. Those who admitted having trained with AK-47s in Afghanistan said they sought only Uighur autonomy in their homeland.

FINDING SYMPATHY

Meantime, activists in town are siding with the Uighurs. They liken their plight to that of the Tibetans, without the benefit of a celebrity like the Dalai Lama to tell their story.

Members of the Tallahassee network deny they are thumbing their noses at China, which labels the Uighurs of Guantánamo ”terrorists” and wants them back.

Nor is the interfaith community making an anti-government statement about U.S. detention policy, says Copeland, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Tallahassee. He told his 175-year-old congregation the story of the Uighurs in a sermon in September.

”It’s a pro-Jesus statement,” Copeland says. “Regardless of one’s political opinion, these are folks who were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they have been so unjustly imprisoned for seven years.

“This issue cuts across all the political agendas. It’s a pro-compassion statement. And a pro-Mohammed statement and a pro-Moses statement.”

Civil rights attorney Kent Spriggs argues that their effort blends charity and capitalism by tapping into Leon County’s diversity.

A Saudi member of the Islamic Center of Tallahassee — a massage therapist by profession — is heading up the host community.

He told the Uighurs’ story to a Turkish-American businessman, who has guaranteed them jobs at his Italian restaurant chain.

A Pakistani-American located a rental apartment within walking distance of Tallahassee’s main mosque.

And at the Lafayette Presbyterian Church, the Rev. John Lown speaks with a lilting southern accent as he explains how he’ll model the absorption program after his ’90s experience with the Northern Virginia Council of Churches resettling Bosnians and Ukrainians.

At Copeland’s church, members are channeling its relief experience from Hurricane Katrina to collect donations. So far, $9,200 have been raised.

”We’re going to show the people of Tallahassee and Florida when people of faith come together for the community good what happens,” say Salah Bakhashwin, 48, a longtime capital resident who spread the word through the city’s 3,000-member Muslim community.

Bakhashwin left his native Saudi for America at age 17, and declares himself weary of a ”guilt-by-association” atmosphere toward Muslims that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Adds Romberg, rabbi at the Reform movement’s Temple Israel: “If indeed these people are found to be harmless, it’s only just that we find a way to take them in, get them on their feet and up and running as people who function in the community.”

The goal: a community embrace of housing, healthcare, jobs, language training, even cellphones linking them to 24/7 community volunteers to make them self-sufficient in three months.

Lawyers for the 17 have said they would identify the three with the best English skills and settle the rest in the Washington area, which has the largest concentration of Uighurs in the United States — about 1,000.

PLEDGE OF AID

The Tallahassee Plan presented to Urbina’s court also includes a commitment to buy them a used car, once they get licenses, and pay for their insurance.

Not everyone in town is as accepting. Copeland came to work the day the news broke to a local woman leaving ”Are you nuts?” on his answering machine.

The unlikely offer to take in the Uighurs started with Spriggs, who served a stint as mayor in the 1980s and learned about the Uighurs while filing suit on behalf of two Afghans at Guantánamo.

Unlike those two, who have since been sent back to their native Afghanistan, the Uighurs couldn’t go home. China considered them hooligan separatists who had fled the country illegally, and the State Department calculated they faced certain persecution if they returned.

Yet, U.S. diplomats couldn’t find a third country to resettle them. Some have since been resettled in Albania and Sweden.

Spriggs told the story to Bakhashwin, who had helped with some Arabic-English translation on a Guantánamo case. They both felt certain that Tallahassee could take three. And that started with community education.

Tallahassee’s imam, an African-American Christian convert to Islam from Philadelphia, has now embraced the idea that he will serve as spiritual leader for three men who spent years in U.S. custody and soon will need to settle into U.S. society.

”Look at the good that can come from it,” said Harris, 30. “This can be an opportunity to show a lot of non-Muslims the real religion of Islam.”

Uyghur Food:  Leghmen

Uyghur taamlirining ichidiki leghmenni yaxshi kormeydighan kishiler az bolsa kirek. Leghmen adette aylilerde dayim etip istimal qilidighan Uyghur taamlirining bir hilidur. Leghmen adette xemirning pishirish usuligha qarap baghlam leghmen( ba zi mian), pilte leghmen,yapilaq leghmen we kesme leghmendin ibaret bir nechche xilgha bolinidu.Leghmenning ustige selip yeydighan qorulmining turlirimu kop bolup,oxshimighan koktatlarni we dari darmanlarni ishlitip oxshimighan temde qorilidu.Towende men adette

Uighur Food

Human rights advocate Rebiya Kadeer speaks Tuesday

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A leading advocate for human rights among minorities in China will give a free lecture Tuesday, Oct. 21, at Davidson College. Rebiya Kadeer, a Uyghur from northwest China, will speak on “China’s Other Tibet: The Plight of China’s Uyghur People” at 7 p.m. in Alvarez College Union 900 Room.

Ms. Kadeer was imprisoned in 2000 for speaking out against Chinese repression of Uyghurs. Now a U.S. resident, she was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 and won the Rafto Prize for Human Rights in 2004.

Her visit is sponsored by Davidson’s Dean Rusk International Studies Program and the East Asian Studies Program. It is the third in a series of four lectures on Chinese issues this fall at the college.

Uyghurs are a Turkic-speaking, predominantly Muslim population in Xinjiang, in northwest China. Born into poverty, Ms. Kadeer became a successful entrepreneur and philanthropist. Once counted among the wealthiest people in the People’s Republic of China, Ms. Kadeer broke with the Chinese government in 1998 and began calling for a change in its repressive policies against the Uyghurs.

In 1999, Ms. Kadeer was sentenced to an eight-year prison term. China released her in 2004 under pressure from the United States. She now dedicates her time to speaking on human rights in China.

Uyghur Canada Jemiyitidin Rukiye Turdush,Tuyghun Abduweli, Gulshen Abdukadir , Feride Mahmut qatarliq kishiler  11- october kuni Kanadadiki Turk birleshmisi uyushturghan alahide ziyapetke qatniship Turkiyening Kanadada turushluq Bash Elchisi Rafet Akgunay bilen korushti.

Source: Uyghur Canadian Society

Unlocking Gitmo

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Wednesday, October 15, 2008

As a federal judge put it, it’s time “to shine the light of constitutionality” on the legal black hole of Guantanamo Bay, the offshore lockup that continues to shame this country, its traditions, and the anti-terrorism fight.

Judge Ricardo Urbina took matters beyond denouncing the Guantanamo’s poisonous effects. He demanded that the Bush administration bring 17 inmates, all of them Uighur Muslim rebels from western China, to his Washington courtroom. His next step, he indicated, would be to set them free, an action that could come this week, pending 11th-hour appeals from the White House’s unbending legal team.

The judge’s action may be the sharpest setback in an overlong legal slugfest between administration hardliners, who defend the no-rules brig, and civil liberties critics who want the gulag brought under mainstream U.S. court rules. Past decisions by the courts, including the Supreme Court, have undercut the White House stance that the 250-odd inmates don’t deserve legal rights.

Yet only a comparative handful of inmates have had trials or been released. The judge has raised the stakes by demanding freedom for the Uighur group who haven’t been charged after being swept up in a post-9/11 ground war in Afghanistan in 2002.

The judge’s decision marks another step toward Gitmo’s overdue closure. Both presidential candidates want to shut it down. What comes next is legal endgame on what to do with the several hundred inmates.

The White House team suggests bringing this group to American shores is unthinkable. What will happen if terrorists beat the charges and are released here?

The solution will be messy and unpredictable, thanks to the Bush team’s ill-considered decision to create Guantanamo. But the general outlines are clear: Resettle the innocent either here or in a foreign country.

The case of the Uighurs may offers a small example. Their ethnic supporters, already here legally, are willing to host them, minimizing fears of outcast Muslims on the loose. The same happy ending may not await every inmate, but it’s time to shut down a twilight zone exception to American norms.

Commentary: Free the Uighurs!

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Aziz Huq
10-15-2008

On Oct. 7, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued an order, unprecedented over the last seven years, directing the government to release immediately 17 Chinese Muslims held at Guantánamo into the continental United States by the end of that week.

The decision by Judge Ricardo Urbina sparked apoplexy inside the government, even though the decision exemplified the simple, sole purpose of habeas corpus — ending illegal detention. For the Justice Department had already conceded that none of the 17 petitioners, all ethnic Uighurs [pronounced wee-gurz] from Western China, were in fact “enemy combatants.” And, as the district court observed in its decision, their years-long detention without cause had already “crossed the constitutional threshold into infinitum.”

That this logical and straightforward holding — that the remedy for unlawful detention is release — is even controversial hints at a troubling gulf between present understandings of the courts’ constitutional functions and the courts’ actual role under the Constitution.

Rather than obey the decision, the government successfully sought a stay from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Even absent legal authority to detain, the Justice Department argued, the power to “wind up” an ongoing illegal detention was a “sovereign” function and hence resistant to judicial review.

The White House too quickly heaped calumny on the district court decision. Press secretary Dana Perino explained that it “strongly disagreed” with the district court ruling because it “could be used as precedent for other detainees” and out of concern for “the safety of the Uighurs themselves.”

This response evinces a certain chutzpah. Of course, a decision releasing one person from, say, Rikers Island is in some sense a “precedent” for other releases — but it hardly means every prisoner must be let go. And no other government of which I am aware of has ever claimed that indefinite detention in a Supermax-like prison on a remote and alien island constitutes “safety.” And the oral argument suggested the real reason for resisting release is a desire to curry favor with China — hardly a persuasive ground for detaining a human being.

Yet the White House’s horror and the Justice Department’s remarkable “wind-up” argument ignore the fact that the district court was doing solely what it is supposed to: ordering release after concluding that a detention is illegal.

EXECUTIVE BULLYING

The Uighurs are proper beneficiaries of the Framers’ decision to guarantee habeas corpus in the Constitution. But the efficacy of habeas has been stymied by executive branch bullying and judicial pusillanimity. Since 2002, not one Guantánamo detainee has been released pursuant to a court’s order — even after error has become apparent.

The government has gutted habeas via two tactics. First, it has slow-balled habeas litigation. By commandeering Congress into enacting jurisdiction-stripping statutes, by failing to meet court deadlines, or by erecting new procedural hurdles, the administration has tried running out the clock on Guantánamo until it becomes Sens. Barack Obama’s or John McCain’s problem.

Second, it has used its physical control of detainees to evade judgments on the merits; releases of detainees have preceded and pre-empted judicial disapprovals.

The Uighur litigation exemplifies both tactics. Five of the 22 Uighurs initially held at Guantánamo were found by the military itself not to be enemy combatants in late 2004 or early 2005. Yet the government could not find any country that would take them — so it held them for more than a year.

In December 2005, U.S. District Judge James Robertson of the District of Columbia ruled the Uighurs’ continued detention was unlawful but accepted the government’s “sovereign power” argument to conclude he lacked effectual remedial power. Mere days before oral argument in the D.C. Circuit in May 2006, the Uighurs’ counsel were informed that the five Uighurs had been transported to putative freedom in Albania. The appeal was dismissed. The government never had to account for long detention that, even by its own account, had become illegal.

LOSING IN COURT

The military review procedures established at Guantánamo, called Combatant Status Review Tribunals, have also been used to delay review and release. In November 2004, a CSRT found one of 17 detainees whose release was at stake Monday, Anvar Hassan, improperly classified as an “enemy combatant.” The Pentagon convened a fresh CSRT. It warned the three panel members that similarly situated Uighurs had been classified as “enemy combatants” and “inconsistencies will not cast a favorable light on the CSRT process.” This second CSRT found Hassan detainable.

The CSRT rulings, unsurprisingly, eventually yielded the slimmest of justifications for detention. One of the Uighurs, Huzaifa Parhat, challenged his detention in the D.C. Circuit under the tightly constrained review scheme established in the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act — a scheme the Supreme Court in June this year held to be an inadequate substitute for habeas corpus.

Litigating under rules it had designed, defending a judgment it had directed its own personnel to reach, and relying on the record it exclusively had created, the government still could not justify Parhat’s detention. The D.C. Circuit held that his detention failed to pass legal muster. The panel suggested Parhat might “immediately” seek habeas relief rather than await another CSRT, and paved the way to Urbina’s order.

NO SOURCE OF PRIDE

The Uighurs’ story has not been one either the courts or the executive can take pride in. Rather, it suggests that a core constitutional remedy has almost fallen into dysfunction and desuetude, in large measure because of two common assumptions about national security and the courts.

The first is the notion that the executive branch is uniquely competent in national security matters and hence should not be second-guessed. This runs through government briefs, judicial opinions, and much commentary. In the writings of professor John Yoo and others, this pragmatic claim takes constitutional color.

Yet the notion of a hyperrational national security executive branch, immune from the biases, temptations, and errancies otherwise afflicting our democratically selected agents, barely withstands a brush with reality. National security is beset by what economists call “agency costs” as the executive branch seeks to indulge its biases, inflate its political credibility, and bluster past its mistakes. There is as much cause to impose oversight on national security policy as on the financial bailout or health care reform — perhaps more.

The Uighurs’ case yields proof of the self-defeating core of national security omnipotence claims. In essence, the administration is claiming the power to detain people for years on end after having wrongfully detained them for years because it is inconvenient to risk their release. A government that makes such a claim undermines its own citizens’ confidence that they will be treated fairly and predictably. It eviscerates the stabilizing springs of its own legitimacy.

The sorry trajectory of the Uighurs highlights a second troubling myth. However much noise exists about “activist” judges, the fact is that federal judges — and not just in habeas — have retreated from the co-equal role they long played in elaborating a just constitutional order.

The Supreme Court has led a tragic rearward march by gutting the remedies that attend statutory and constitutional rights. It has cut off implied rights of action, deterred civil rights suits through uncharitable interpretations of fee-shifting statutes, cultivated a thicket of immunity doctrine to deny remedies even to wounded plaintiffs, and fashioned an extraconstitutional barrier, through sovereign immunity cases to suits against government tortfeasors.

Animating all these cases is a gimlet-eyed derision of courts as partners in democratic governance. Lost is any sense that the Founders crafted a government with three co-equal branches, each poised to constrain the others’ overreaching. Cloaked in lofty rhetoric about respect for the democratic process, the Court has abandoned in significant measures the checks that insure against the self-enriching abuse of democratically delegated powers.

The district court opinion about the Uighurs, of course, is but a glowing ember against this bleak backdrop. Its advent does not necessarily signal any sea-change. Yet it is past welcome, nonetheless, as a telling repudiation of the constitutional myths of our day.

Uighurs without a country

Boston Globe
October 15, 2008

THE FEDERAL judiciary still has at least some independent souls. One of them, US District Judge Ricardo Urbina, last week instructed the Bush administration to release 17 Guantanamo prisoners to freedom in the United States, after the government could provide no evidence the inmates had ever presented a security threat to this country. Unfortunately, a rattled Justice Department immediately got a stay of Urbina’s order from an appeals court.

The 17 are Uighurs - Muslims from a western province of China that has long sought greater autonomy from Beijing. They had been in Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border during the US war against Afghanistan in 2002, and were taken into custody at a time when US officials were paying $5,000 bounties for suspected terrorists.

The government has long since given up any pretense that the Uighurs (pronounced wee-gurs) had fought against US forces. But Washington knows it would be wrong to hand them over to likely imprisonment, or worse, in China. The administration has tried to prevail on other countries to take the Uighurs. None has agreed to, however, both because of administration rhetoric about Gitmo inmates being the “worst of the worst” and because other countries do not want to incur China’s wrath.

Those obstacles notwithstanding, it’s always a shame when the US judiciary treats basic rights, such as habeas corpus, the way Massachusetts drivers treat “yield” signs. There is no good reason to hold the 17 any longer. Seventeen Uighur-American families living in the Washington area have agreed to be sponsors of the prisoners once they are released.

Every additional day they spend at Guantanamo makes a mockery of the rule of law in the United States.