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US paid $200M to Palau to take care of 17 Uyghur detainees

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by ymc, Jun 10, 2009.

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  1. ymc

    ymc Member

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    $12M per pop? No wonder we owe the Chinese trillions of dollars. :rolleyes:

    http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/uighur-problem/

    Uighur Problem
    By Eric Etheridge

    “And so ends a demagoguery-laced vignette from the Age of Terrorism,” writes Spencer Ackerman today of the deal to send most or all of the 17 Uighur detainees — “whom the Bush administration no longer considered enemy combatants” — from Guantanamo to the Pacfic island nation Palau.

    Having no basis under which to detain the Uighurs, and being prevented from sending them back to China where they’d likely be tortured, both the Bush and the Obama administrations had little idea what to do with the Uighurs. Some in the Uighur community in Northern Virginia initially agreed to take in the detainees, but that proposal met loud objections from Republican members of Congress — joined by fearful Virgina Democratic politicians like Sen. Jim Webb — who transmogrified the freeing of the Uighurs into an imaginary Obama administration plot to have Khalid Shaikh Mohammed rent the foreclosed house in your exurban cul-de-sac.

    “One can’t blame Palau for taking the deal,” which reportedly includes $200 million in new U.S. aid, writes Ed Morrisey at Hot Air.

    First, their entire GDP for 2008 was $164 million, according to the CIA Factbook. Over 85,000 tourists visited Palau and provided about $120 million of that. Now 17 Uighurs will come to Palau with $12 million each. If they’re truly rehabilitated, well, what a deal, right? Plus, Palau gets to stick a finger in Beijing’s eye; they don’t recognize the communist regime at all and have close ties to Taiwan.

    Why Palau? At the New Republic, Jason Zengerle shares the analysis of an anonymous friend who has “deep knowledge” of the country: “It’s funny how perfect the whole thing is.”

    It’s really not a very big amount of money for the US, they get this plus defense rights plus a UN vote whenever they need it (for a while every year there would be some Cuba UN vote with only Palau, the Marshall Islands and Israel joining the US). . . .

    Meanwhile, Palau has no reason to avoid making China mad — they already recognize Taiwan, so China doesn’t like them anyway — which apparently was one of the big problems with some of the other possibilities. But it has a decent sized Chinese population (much of which is tied to the prostitution industry), and, best of all, the conversations between the Mormon missionaries who go over and the Uighurs will be epic (and would be an awesome reality show).

    Like most of the issues emanating from Bush’s Global War on Terror, the response to the Uighurs’s situation breaks down along left-right lines, and there is no agreement on even the most basic issue of whether the Uighurs ever were a threat to anyone.

    According to Thomas Joscelyn at the Weekly Standard, the Times story today leaves out crucial details about the detainees’ associations:

    The Times blames the reticence of other foreign governments [to take the Uighurs] on pressure from Beijing. But, the Times does not mention that all 17 Uighur detainees are either members or associates of the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement (also known as the Turkestan Islamic Party), a U.S. and UN-designated al Qaeda affiliate. Most of the Uighur detainees have admitted they were trained at ETIM/TIP training camps. And at least eight of them have admitted that Abdul Haq, a member of al Qaeda’s elite Shura council, ran the training camps where they learned to wage jihad.

    Ed Morrisey thinks there is some risk to Palau citizens and tourists:

    Of course, with a recidivism rate for released Gitmo detainees of around 14%, odds are that a couple of the Uighurs might not be quite as cuddly as Obama promises. Hopefully it will work out all right for Palau and its tourists, but if I were making decisions on expensive South Pacific vacations, I’d start looking elsewhere.

    And at National Review, Jonah Goldberg says the whole “enemy combatant ‘problem’ can be understood like a toxic waste issue (and, no, I’m not trying to dehumanize these fairly inhuman people — they do that just fine on their own).”

    My understanding is that in Superfund-type clean-ups is that the first 99% or so is pretty easy to take care of. You can process the material in some way or another safely. But that last bit (whether it’s the last 5% or the last .00005%) is very, very expensive to clean-up, often more expensive than the first 95%-99%. The prisoners at Gitmo are rapidly approaching the intractable percentage. Most of the Gitmo detainees have already been processed out. Those were the comparatively easy cases. Now we’re left with the really radioactive prisoners and nobody wants them in their backyard, in America or Europe. Just look at the comical lengths the Obama administration is going to to dump the Uighurs on some tiny pacific island (didn’t we litterally do the same thing with toxic waste for a time? Maybe we still do). And the Uighurs are a much easier case than the rest of the worst of the worst.

    At Salon, Glen Greenwald has a different take. Responding to Morrisey’s concerns about the safety of travel to Palua, he writes: “It’s hard to put into words how inebriated with irrational fear someone has to be in order to be so scared of 17 Uighurs — who were never guilty of anything — that they would avoid traveling to whatever place this handful of persecuted individuals is located.”

    But this is the right-wing movement at its core: its leaders cynically ratchet up fear levels as high as possible to justify whatever they want to do (invade Iraq, torture people, spy on Americans with no warrants) and their adherents (along with plenty of others) become more and more paralyzed by their fears of anything Muslim. This, after all, is the same faction that continues to shake with terror at the very idea that accused Terrorists will be brought to the U.S. — in handcuffs, imprisoned, and disappeared into super-max facilities. And it is the same faction that made accepting the Uighurs into the U.S. politically unpalatable by threatening legislation — The Keep Terrorists Out of America Act — that would bar their entrance.

    Anonymous Liberal shares Greenwald’s point of view: “Conservative blogs are all mocking the Obama administration’s reported plan to resettle most of the 17 Uighur detainees.”

    If you read their posts, there’s a disturbing lack of appreciation of the most important facts in this story. These men have nothing to do with al Qaeda. They are people who were turned over to the U.S. by bounty hunters and were subsequently declared, by the Bush administration, not to be enemy combatants. We, as a country, have no legal or moral basis for holding them at all. And yet they’ve been imprisoned in isolation for over seven years. . . .

    That the plight of these men elicits precisely zero sympathy (indeed, it provokes laughter) from most supposedly freedom-loving conservatives in this county underscores the extent to which many conservatives have managed to dehumanize in their own minds the many foreigners whose lives are impacted by our policies.. . .

    This is not a joke. These are real people. And many of them have been imprisoned without justification for the better part of a decade. If the Obama administration has managed to find a way to restore their freedom, that plan should be praised, not mocked.
     
    #1 ymc, Jun 10, 2009
  2. pgabriel

    pgabriel Educated Negro

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    I didn't read this piece but I saw this on Rachel Maddow last night. The real issue more than anything else is these guys aren't accused of anything and have spent years in Gitmo
     
    #2 pgabriel, Jun 10, 2009
  3. ymc

    ymc Member

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    Well, but that's Bush's fault. Now he is gone. So we should focus on the decisions being made now.
     
    #3 ymc, Jun 10, 2009
  4. pgabriel

    pgabriel Educated Negro

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    okay, scanned through the article, didn't see this mention, but Rachel also talked about how Bush listed this little tinne itsy bitsy republic as a coalition of the willing in Iraq.

    And they don't have a freakin Army
     
    #4 pgabriel, Jun 10, 2009
  5. basso

    basso Member
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    <object width="640" height="505"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/TWeK0-b-ulk&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/TWeK0-b-ulk&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="505"></embed></object>
     
    #5 basso, Jun 10, 2009
  6. SamFisher

    SamFisher Member

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    OK, I'll bite - please explain the relation between these two things.
     
    #6 SamFisher, Jun 10, 2009
  7. rockbox

    rockbox Around before clutchcity.com

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    ^^^

    Because our government wastes money like no other. To be honest though, if these guys could sue us, they would probably win more than that in court. 7 years in Gitmo for doing nothing at all.
     
    #7 rockbox, Jun 10, 2009
  8. thumbs

    thumbs Member

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    Finally, the government took up my idea of sending these terrorists to an island. However, I should have known. Instead of a barren, icy island in the Aleutians where they could not escape, Obama sends them to an idyllic paradise along with $200M for their upkeep. I think I'm going to apply for the weeger (Uyghur) treatment and 1/20th of the upkeep fee.
     
    #8 thumbs, Jun 10, 2009
    Last edited: Jun 10, 2009
  9. Ottomaton

    Ottomaton Member
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    Of course, you still fail to grasp that courts have consistently ruled that these people aren't terrorists, never were terrorists or enemy combatants and are not and never were a danger to the USA.

    If they were terrorists, you might have a point. If the USA wrongly held you at Gitmo for 7 years, I would like to think you might be entitled to a little bit of effort on the part of the USA to find you a place to live.
     
    #9 Ottomaton, Jun 10, 2009
  10. thumbs

    thumbs Member

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    A verdict by trial or tribunal has already determined this?
     
    #10 thumbs, Jun 10, 2009
  11. Ottomaton

    Ottomaton Member
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    Yes. Since 2003 they have been treated as mistakenly held and this has been affirmed by two federal courts.
     
    #11 Ottomaton, Jun 10, 2009
  12. thumbs

    thumbs Member

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    Then why doesn't Obama transport them to Miami and let them go with $50K each? That would be cheaper. From Miami they could catch a plane to anywhere they want.
     
    #12 thumbs, Jun 10, 2009
  13. SamFisher

    SamFisher Member

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    Because they don't have valid passports to go anywhere, and the US doesn't want to send them back to China (if they would even take them) and create a political firestorm after they are imprisoned and/or executed, hence the effort to find them a new home.

    Why is it a waste? The cost of housing them in a federal prison system without cause over the rest of their natural lives, is probably easily in the millions of dolllars.

    As far as Palau goes - the country is already heavily subsidized by teh US since WWII and has been for a long time for strategic reasons, that is as much as part of the payment as anything else.

    Finally, as far as China, that's a function of trade imbalances and currency fluctuations as it is of spending. So no, ymc is drinking a glass of fail for that silly comment.
     
    #13 SamFisher, Jun 10, 2009
  14. Ottomaton

    Ottomaton Member
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    OK, I'm getting a little out of my depth here, but as I understand it, the prosecutors at the tribunals said that they were wrongly held and no danger to the USA, but decided that since they didn't have anywhere to go, they should just stay at Gitmo anyway.

    I believe they didn't like the thought of staying in a prison after having been declared innocent of any crime, so they took the US to court. The District Court that they went to ruled that they should be released in D.C., but Bush didn't like that, so the Justice Department appealed. The appeals court agreed with the first court that they were being held illegally, but ruled that the first court didn't have the jurisdiction to override the immigration laws of the USA.

    Parallel to this, after the first court verdict, there was a huge outrage in Congress (mostly Republican but some Democrats as well) at the idea that the people would be released in the USA. They organized and essentially made it very politically difficult for these people to get released in the USA with anything less than a court order, which obviously wasn’t coming after the appeals court made their ruling.

    Both Bush and Obama apparently didn’t want to walk into that political s—tstorm, so they looked for other countries to take them. But China didn’t want them released, as they were considered ‘separatists’ by China so they threatened any country that took them with grave diplomatic and economic sanctions. Albania took 5 or 6 a couple of years ago, but wouldn’t take more because they are afraid of China. Apparently the ones that Albania took have basically become ‘Albanian folk heroes’ or something like that, but the USA hasn’t found anybody at all willing to take the others, and nobody in the USA was going to stick their neck out on their behalf, so the remaining Uyghurs have basically sat in limbo at Gitmo, declared free of any wrongdoing or crimes, but stuck in a prison and treated as prisoners.
     
    #14 Ottomaton, Jun 10, 2009
    Last edited: Jun 10, 2009
  15. Major

    Major Member

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    From the article:

    Some in the Uighur community in Northern Virginia initially agreed to take in the detainees, but that proposal met loud objections from Republican members of Congress — joined by fearful Virgina Democratic politicians like Sen. Jim Webb — who transmogrified the freeing of the Uighurs into an imaginary Obama administration plot to have Khalid Shaikh Mohammed rent the foreclosed house in your exurban cul-de-sac.
     
    #15 Major, Jun 10, 2009
  16. Bandwagoner

    Bandwagoner Member

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    That dude creeps me out.
     
    #16 Bandwagoner, Jun 10, 2009
  17. thumbs

    thumbs Member

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    Okay, release them in Boston or at the Kennedy compound. There's no Republicans there. ;)
     
    #17 thumbs, Jun 10, 2009
  18. pirc1

    pirc1 Member

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    What is a terrorist? If these people are in groups that committ terrorist acts in China are they terrorist? If that is not the case, then I guess other countries should not care about terrorists that only target Us? So if China ever catch al-Qaeda leaders hiding in China they should just set them free some where else right?
     
    #18 pirc1, Jun 11, 2009
  19. SamFisher

    SamFisher Member

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    See we have a little thing called due process in which we have to actually prove that people committed crimes or at least are somehow dangerous to somebody or something before we can lock them - which is why the courts did not take very kindly to the Bush Administration's attempts to circumvent this at Guantanamo.

    We can't do that with these individuals, since, like hundreds of their fellow prisoners already released from Guantanamo, they committed no crimes that we know of and were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    The only difference is that unlike the other released prisoners, we couldn't find anyplace that would take them for fear of Chinese bullying. Until now.
     
    #19 SamFisher, Jun 11, 2009
  20. pirc1

    pirc1 Member

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    Other than that they said they were training to fight in China someday. They were not going to fight against the US, then I am sure they are not terrorists.

    We know Hamas is not a terrost organization since they are fighting to free their land.

    And if people go blow themselves up in North Korea shops then they are not terrorists but heros I am sure.
     
    #20 pirc1, Jun 11, 2009
    Last edited: Jun 11, 2009
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