Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Where now for the Uighurs?

The absolutely ridiculous situation of the "Guantanamo Uighurs" is somehow darkly symbolic of the fag-end of an utterly failed Presidency. So a bunch of Chinese Uighurs get picked up in Afghanistan in 2001/2002 and dropped into the legal black hole of Guantanamo as suspected terrorists. Slowly the American judicial branch claws back authority from an executive drunk on powers and give habeus corpus rights to the inmates. At this point even the Bush the administration gives up on the pretense that these guys were anything other than innocent bystanders swept up in the invasion and agree that they have to be released. But they won't release them in the U.S. because that would just make them look silly, yet international conventions that the U.S. is party to won't allow them to hnad them back to China because of a reasonable fear that the Chinese authorities will... wait for it... torture them. So the Uighurs continue to rot in Guantanamo whilst the U.S. desperately tries and bribe some poor country to take them as refugees. Meanwhile Chinese diplomats chase around the world threatening and/or bribing any country that might consider it.

So the Bush administration, that has attempted to make torture part of U.S. law, won't release innocent men to China because they fear that they might be tortured. Roll on November 4. It's hard to imagine that even McCain/Palin could make any less sense than this lot.

1 comment:

Katie said...

I don't know, if even half of what I hear about Sarah Palin is half true then she's be more than capable of it!