by Maggie Temple-Smith | Palau, a "sparsley populated archipelago in the North Pacific," has agreed to accept the 17 Chinese now in prison at Guantanamo, The New York Times reports. This is the first agreement reached since Obama took office -- so far, 100 countries have said, "No, thanks" when asked to accept Gitmo detainees.
[The agreement] gives Mr. Obama some relief on an issue that has become a political hot button among Congressional Republicans and even some Democrats, who have noisily protested against releasing what they call potentially dangerous extremists on American soil or transferring them to prisons in the United States.
The Chinese government accuses some Uighurs of leading an Islamic separatist movement in far western China, and Beijing has pressed many countries not to accept the detainees. Palau, which was a United States trust territory until its independence in 1994, maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan rather than China, making it less vulnerable to pressure from Beijing. (More at The New York Times)
At HuffPost, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantanamo Files, asks: Is this a joke?
The Uighurs are Muslims from China's Xinjiang province, who were swept up in the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, and sold to U.S. forces by Pakistani villagers after fleeing from a run-down hamlet in which they had sought solace from their Chinese oppressors, or, in many cases, because they had found themselves unable to make their way to Turkey or Europe, to look for work, as they had originally intended.
Despite this, their proposed resettlement in the United States has caused panic attacks amongst politicians whose understanding of the prison's inhabitants has clearly gone no further than to curl up at Dick Cheney's knee, and say, "Gee, tell me again how the prisoners in Guantánamo are the most dangerous terrorists in the world?"
Apparently unable to understand that the majority of the prisoners in Guantánamo were bought for bounties, and were never adequately screened to determine their status, these fearful politicians continue to ignore the copious amounts of research demonstrating that all but a few dozen of the remaining 239 prisoners are either completely innocent men, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan that began long before the 9/11 attacks, and had nothing to do with international terrorism.
Worthington finds Palau a "canny" option.
At Newshoggers, Anderson writes:
More blogger commentary at Memeorandum.....
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