Tag: Uighurs

Jul 06 2009

Did you know…?

What the heck. Let’s play hookey.

Greenwald has an interesting piece today on the Uighers. He references an article from the NYT this morning which reports:

The Chinese state news agency reported Monday that 156 people were killed and more than 800 injured when rioters clashed with the police in a regional capital in western China after days of rising tensions between members of the Uighur ethnic group and Han Chinese.

The casualty toll, if confirmed, would make this the deadliest outbreak of violence in China in many years.

So, it being Monday (laundry day), I wandered off on another google-chase.

Photobucket

Jun 15 2009

Finally: Freedom

freedom

SFGate.com:

They once were terrorism suspects, but even after U.S. authorities determined the men weren’t a threat to the United States, they were kept at the Guantanamo Bay prison for years because no nation would take them – until a few days ago, when Bermuda agreed to let them in as refugees.

“When we didn’t have any country to accept us, when everybody was afraid of us … Bermuda had the courage and was brave enough to accept us,” said Abdulla Abdulgadir, who at 30 is the youngest of the four men who relished their first weekend of freedom in seven years.

Abdulgadir eagerly embraced his new island home. “We are not moving anywhere,” he said.

Jun 12 2009

Starvation, Suicide, Torture, Not Terrorism, Is Guantanamo Legacy

From almost the moment that Camp X-Ray opened, prisoners embarked on hunger strikes as the only means available to protest about the conditions of their detention: specifically, their day-to-day treatment, the treatment of the Koran, and the crushing uncertainty of their fate, as they remained imprisoned without charge and without trial, with the ever-present possibility that they would be held for the rest of their lives.

Andy Worthington has released the results of an important investigation he undertook on treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo, Guantanamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics Of Starvation (PDF) (his article introducing it is here).

Apr 09 2009

D.C. Court: No Judicial Appeal on Torture Transfer for Uighurs, Other Gitmo “Detainees”

Center for Constitutional Rights reports today that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overruled a district court ruling, in Kiyemba et al. v. Barack Obama (PDF), that prisoners at Guantanamo must get 30 days notice of any pending transfer to another nation. The Court said that the judiciary cannot “second-guess” the Executive regarding its assertion that prisoners would not be transferred to a country that would torture them.

According to the ruling, the decision arose from the Uighurs case, which has been much in the news in past months, as the U.S. has already said these prisoners are not “enemy combatants”, and are not being charged with any crime (even as they remain at Guantanamo, where they have been held for over seven years, many of them in windowless cells 22 hours a day). The Circuit Court notes: