The Uighurs

Andy McCarthy, the prosecutor for the first World Trade Center (1993) bombing, writes, Uighurs: Sometimes, the Obama Friday Night Bad News Dump Is Bad for the Left

The Obama Justice Department told the Supreme Court this evening that the Uighurs have no right to be released into the United States.

The Uighurs, Chinese Muslim detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, received terrorist training at al Qaeda affiliated camps (from an organization formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization under U.S. law) and were captured after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. They are the Left’s combatant cause célèbre. The military took the incoherent position that they were trained al Qaeda terrorists but that their real beef was with China, not us. Thus, the federal courts have held that they are not enemy combatants. The government has been trying to relocate them for years but no country will take the remaining 17 — other than China, where our treaty obligations arguably forbid us from sending them because there is reason to believe they’d be persecuted.

Of course, it’s one thing to say that they are not enemy combatants and should therefore be released. It is quite another thing, though, to say that they should be released into the United States (which, because of their terrorist affiliations, would violate federal immigration law).

Federal judge Richard Urbina tried to order their release into the US; the DC Court of Appeals overruled Urbina,

The Uighurs appealed, and today the Justice Department filed its responsive brief. Solicitor General Elena Kagan argued — consistent with the Bush administration position — that the Uighurs have no right to be released into the U.S.

This is an important decision not only for domestic security, but also because as Michael Goldfarb points out,

European nations are clamoring for the U.S. to accept some of the Uighur detainees in return for accepting some themselves.

Bottom line: the Uighurs have no right to be released into the US.