Life After Guantanamo: Why the Media's Happy-Ending Narrative Is Totally Bankrupt

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted June 20, 2009.

In a 2006 op-ed published by the New York Times, former Guantanamo prisoner Abu Bakker Qassim wrote: "I was locked up and mistreated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time during America's war in Afghanistan. Like hundreds of Guantánamo detainees, I was never a terrorist or a soldier. I was never even on a battlefield. Pakistani bounty hunters sold me and 17 other Uighurs to the United States military like animals for $5,000 a head. The Americans made a terrible mistake."

Resettling the Uighurs in the United States has proved to be a political impossibility, nevertheless, thanks to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. When a community in northern Virginia that is home to a Uighur immigrant population volunteered to take them in, local lawmakers protested. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va.,who has been a critic of China's record against the Uighurs, nevertheless told Fox News that "a terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist." Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., took the same line, telling ABC's George Stephanopoulos in May, "I don't believe they should come to the United States."

"Not to the United States and not Virginia," Stephanopoulos said.

"No, I don't believe so," said Webb.

In the end, the story of how Bermuda came to house the four Uighur men is itself something of a mystery -- and at the center of a diplomatic flap between the U.S. and Britain. (Bermuda is a British territory.) British authorities claim that they were not told the "secret deal" had been struck with the premier of Bermuda, Ewart Brown.

"The Americans were fully aware of the foreign policy understanding we have with Bermuda, and they deliberately chose to ignore it," one senior British official said. "This is not the kind of behavior one expects from an ally."

Someone might tell the U.S. and the U.K. to set their imperial egos aside. The real injustice is that the innocent Uighurs remained imprisoned for years after they were no longer deemed to be guilty of anything.

"When we get a little removed and get some perspective on this, we all should feel a large sense of shame," Guantanamo attorney Sabin Willett said. "What makes us so pathetic that we can't resolve our own problems and have to send them to islands? Shame on us."

Willett, the Boston-based lawyer who represented the resettled Uighurs, recently shared the details leading up to his clients' release in an interview with the American Lawyer. He only discovered that the U.S. government had decided to send his clients to Bermuda at the end of last month. Before Willett told his clients, however, he took "some precautionary steps."

"Over the years, I have figured out who the monitoring guy at the Pentagon is that listens in on our calls," says Willett. "So I called him up and said, 'If this leaks, I'll know that you were the source.' " That might have done the trick -- there were no leaks prior to the landing in Bermuda. (Willett, who signed on to represent some of the Uighurs held at Guantanamo in 2005, took a similar hard line with his clients. He warned the detainees that if the news got out before they landed on Bermudan soil, they might be stuck at Guantanamo for several more months.)

Willett's clients arrived in Bermuda before 6 a.m. on June 11th.

"Nobody's slept for two days, everyone's giddy, the guys are just so thrilled," Willett said. "Something I didn't understand until now is what it must have felt like to be the world's outcasts, the people that nobody wanted. This little island wanted them, and they feel immense gratitude."

Haunted by Guantanamo

Not all those released from Guantanamo in the past few years have felt so grateful.

In November 2003, a handful of newly freed prisoners spoke to the BBC's correspondent in Peshawar. One, Abdul Raziq, a Pakistani, told the BBC, "I have no complaints against the Americans or the Afghans, and I don't seek any compensation from anyone. I leave it to Allah to reward me." But he said he has vowed never to speak English again, having been singled out for mistreatment while imprisoned in Afghanistan because of it.

See more stories tagged with: china, new york times, jim webb, guantanamo, albania, huzaifa parhat, uighurs, bermuda, abdul nasser, abdul semet, salahidin abdulahat, abdullah abdulquadirakhun, jalal jalaladin

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