Much to the chagrin of the Obama
administration and applause of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), the U.S. Supreme Court said today it will consider whether judges have the right
to release into the U.S. detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who have
been determined not to be a terrorist threat.
It's not that the Surfin' Congressman wants former terror suspects flocking to his Surf City district–although the Supremes seem to at least be opening the door to that possibility should they reach the conclusion Rohrabacher desires.
No, Rohrabacher, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Oversight
Subcommittee, and Rep. William Delahunt (D-Mass.), the subcommittee's chairman, are congressional leaders in the call for the release of one particular subset of detainees: Uighurs.
There's no denying the Muslim ethnic group from central Asia and the
Xinjiang province in western
China have suffered a shitty fate.
]
Uighurs say they are persecuted
in China, where they are considered terrorists by the Red State. And
so, after Sept. 11, 2001, when anyone labeled by any government to be a
terrorist was picked up in wide-ranging sweeps, 22 Uighurs were
arrested in Afghanistan,
where they had fled to in protest of Chinese taxes. From
there, they wound up in Guantanamo.
The
Bush
administration determined that the Uighurs pose no security threat to
the U.S., but efforts to release them are complicated. Returning them to their native China would set them up
for persecution and releasing them anywhere else would set the receiving country up for condemnation from the Chinese
government.
Rabid anti-Communist Rohrabacher clings to an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend philosophy (see his involvement with Mujahedin fighters killing Soviets in Afghanistan, before they moved on to killing Americans in Afghanistan). He has no patience with the Obama administration's attempts to relocate the Uighurs.
Normally a darling of conservatives (the fringier, the better), Rohrabacher has also found himself at odds with Newt Gingrich and the Weekly Standard's Thomas Joscelyn when it comes to the Uighurs. Using such unflattering terms as “It is just a wild allegation,” “Rohrabacher's 'logic'” and “unhinged,” Joscelyn posted “Rep. Rohrabacher is Wrong About the Uighurs at Gitmo” on weeklystandard.com's The Blog in June. That prompted this response from Rohrabacher, and this response to Dana's response from Joscelyn.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.