From Gitmo to the U.S.: How 17 Uighur Prisoners Could Be Let Into the United States

In an extraordinary and unprecedented ruling in a U.S. District Court, Judge Ricardo Urbina has ruled that 17 wrongly imprisoned Chinese Muslims at Guantánamo must be allowed entry to the United States. It is, as the media has been reporting, the first time that a U.S. court has directly ordered the release of a prisoner at Guantánamo, and the first time that a foreign national held at the prison has been ordered to be brought to the United States. It is also a resounding blow to the administration's claims that it can seize anyone it wishes as an "enemy combatant," and hold them indefinitely, even if there is no evidence whatsoever to support their detention.

The road to Guantánamo

The 17 men -- Uighurs (or Uyghurs) from Xinjiang province in the People's Republic of China (known to the Uighurs as East Turkestan) -- have been a problem for the authorities since they were captured nearly seven years ago. Refugees from Chinese oppression, 13 of the men had, by accident or design, made their way to a run-down hamlet in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains, where they spent their time making the place habitable, and indulging in futile dreams of rising up against their historic oppressors. After the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, they were targeted in a U.S. bombing raid, in which several of their companions died. The survivors made their way to the Pakistani border, where they were welcomed by villagers, who betrayed them soon after, selling them for a bounty to U.S. forces.

The other four Uighurs were caught up in similarly bleak scenarios. One had fled from death and destruction in Kabul, and was caught as he attempted to cross the Pakistani border, and three were randomly seized in northern Afghanistan and imprisoned with several hundred foreign Taliban fighters in Qala-i-Janghi, a fort run by General Rashid Dostum, one of the leaders of the Northern Alliance. When Alliance troops, with support from U.S. and British Special Forces, began tying the men's hands behind their backs, some of the Taliban soldiers thought that they were about to be executed, and rose up against their captors. In the ensuing massacre -- involving ground troops and bombing raids -- the majority of the prisoners were killed, but the Uighurs, along with 84 others, had stayed in the basement, where they survived death by bombing, fire and flooding, and they were part of a group of around 50 survivors who were eventually transferred to Guantánamo.

According to Chris Mackey, the pseudonym of a senior interrogator at the US-run prisons in Kandahar and Bagram, which were used to process the prisoners for Guantánamo, U.S. forces realized almost immediately that the men were not involved with al-Qaeda, but decided to hold them for their supposed intelligence value. In his book The Interrogators, Mackey explained that their arrival triggered a frenzy of activity in the upper echelons of the administration. "The requests for follow-up questions flooded in from Washington," he wrote, "and every query that came in made it clear that U.S. intelligence was starting from practically zero with this group."

Twisted tribunals

Transferred to Guantánamo, so that the authorities could continue milking them for information about China, the U.S. authorities nevertheless persisted in identifying the men with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, by claiming that they were associated with the East Turkestan Independence Movement (ETIM), a Uighur resistance group. And when the administration sought support from China for its invasion of Iraq -- or, at least, a lack of opposition -- it obligingly designated ETIM a terrorist organization, and allowed Chinese interrogators to visit Guantánamo, where, according to several of the prisoners, they received threats that they would be killed if they ever returned to China.