Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

June 17, 2009 By Fausta

Uighurs in paradise

Train with al-Qaeda, bask in Bermuda:

15uigherxlarge1

Here you have it: four guys enjoying a great day at the beach, on someone else’s dime. New clothes, a new lease on life,

In newly purchased polo shirts and chinos, the four husky men, members of a restive ethnic minority from western China, might blend in except for their scruffy beards. Smelling hibiscus flowers, luxuriating in the freedom to drift through scenic streets and harbors, they expressed wonder at their good fortune in landing here after a captivity that included more than a year in solitary confinement.

Makes you want to join them, doesn’t it?

And they’ll be getting Bermudan citizenship soon enough, too. Hmm….Bermuda has nicer tax laws that we have (even Vladimir Putin realizes that), but I digress.

Couldn’t happen to a bunch of nicer guys, couldn’t it?

I’ll be talking about this in today’s podcast at 11AM Eastern.

UPDATE
it don’t GITMO better than this

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Filed Under: al-Qaeda, Barack Obama, Caribbean, China, terrorism Tagged With: Bermuda, Fausta's blog, Gitmo, Uighurs

June 12, 2009 By Fausta

The Uighur wiggle

Via Ed, the Bermuda Parliament is hoppin’ mad over the Gitmo alumni reunion on their island:
Breaking News: UBP proposes motion of no confidence

The United Bermuda Party today moved for a motion of no confidence against the Government led by Premier Ewart Brown.

Opposition leader Kim Swan proposed the motion in the House of Assembly this morning.
…
“This is not just about Uighurs in Bermuda, though that issue typifies a style of leadership that is reckless, autocratic and conducted with no sense of accountability to the people or, indeed, to Bermuda’s Constitution.”

Britain‘s Foreign Office is also telling Ewart Brown that he had no right to agree to take Uighur inmates without consulting London.

The decision to move the Uighurs to Bermuda is the Obama administration’s blunder that appears to have PO’d the most people, at least so far:

  • The Chinese, who want them back
  • The Brits, who were not consulted even when Bermuda’s part of the Commonwealth and Britain is responsible for its security
  • The Governor of Bermuda, who was told on Thursday night – when they were on their way
  • The people of the Bermuda, and now the opposition’s upcoming vote of no confidence

Did I leave anyone out?

Where’s that overload button when you need it?

>overload-button

Pun on the post title? yes. You say Uighur, I say weegur.

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Filed Under: al-Qaeda, Barack Obama, Caribbean, China, terrorism Tagged With: Bermuda, Fausta's blog, Gitmo, Uighurs

June 12, 2009 By Fausta

Where will the Uighurs go? Not the USA

Obama Bows on Settling Detainees
Administration Gives Up on Bringing Cleared Inmates to U.S., Officials Say

The Obama administration has all but abandoned plans to allow Guantanamo Bay detainees who have been cleared for release to live in the United States, administration officials said yesterday, a decision that reflects bipartisan congressional opposition to admitting such prisoners but complicates efforts to persuade European allies to accept them.

Four Uighur detainees, Chinese Muslims who were incarcerated at the U.S. military prison in Cuba for more than seven years, arrived early yesterday in Bermuda, where they will become foreign guest workers. An administration official said the United States is engaged in negotiations with other countries, including Palau, an island nation in the western Pacific, to find places for the remaining 13 Uighurs held at Guantanamo.

As I posted yesterday, the Brits are going through the roof over the Bermuda relocation since they were not consulted. The people of Palau are angry and fear for their safety, too.

China considers the Uighurs “terrorist suspects” and wants them back, but the administration refuses to return them to China.

The 17 Uighurs, who acuse the US of being twice as bad as the Nazis,

were picked up in the training camps in Afghanistan where they were preparing for Jihad against China. They were cleared for release, in part, because their supporters claim the United States is not their direct enemy.

Thomas Joscelyn has more details on the background of the four Uighurs relocated to Bermuda:

All four of them are members or associates of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (otherwise known as the Turkistan Islamic Party). The ETIM/TIP is a U.S. and UN designated terrorist organization affiliated with al Qaeda and has attacked civilians in China, as well as reportedly plotted against other targets elsewhere, including the U.S. embassy in Kyrgyzstan. According to the State Department, ETIM/TIP members have also fought alongside the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And last year the organization threatened to attack the Olympic Games in China.

The four Uighurs attempted to deny any relationship with the ETIM/TIP, the Taliban, and al Qaeda during their CSRTs. But their denials are not credible. In the context of their denials they made important admissions.

For example, all four of the Uighurs admitted during their combatant status review tribunals (CSRTs) at Gitmo that they received training in the Taliban’s Afghanistan. And all four of them received this training at an ETIM/TIP terrorist training facility in Tora Bora, a key area once controlled by the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Three of the four Uighurs transferred to Bermuda also admitted that they had firsthand ties to senior terrorists such as Hassan Mahsum and Abdul Haq – the leaders of the ETIM/TIP. Haq was recently designated an al Qaeda terrorist by the Obama administration’s Treasury Department, which noted that he is also a member of al Qaeda’s elite Shura council. Mahsum was killed in a Taliban and al Qaeda stronghold in northern Pakistan in 2003.

Joscelyn’s post has a lot more details on their testimony.

One thing is clear, these men who were released admitted ties to senior al Qaeda terrorists.

For their efforts, some of them get to relocate to choice travel spots, at American taxpayers’ expense. In Palau’s case, it comes to $11.7 million per detainee.

ramirez_palau

John Hinderaker comments,

Bermuda may or may not be Heaven on earth, but it’s my nominee. If you haven’t been there, you should go. But, if I’m not mistaken, you can only buy a round-trip ticket. Bermuda doesn’t allow riffraff to hang around. You have to apply to get in if you want to stay for more than a week or two. Except, I guess, if you’re an Islamic terrorist who has become an embarrassment to Barack Obama. It is a very weird world in which we live.

If I believed in alternate universes, I’d say that somewhere in an alternate universe, a huge crowd in a movie theater must be having a big laugh at us.

UPDATE
A friend who lives in a tropical vacation spot reminds me that the Uighurs were these guys:

Not long after being granted access to TV, some of the Uighurs were watching a soccer game. When a woman with bare arms was shown on the screen, one of the group grabbed the television and threw it to the ground, according to the officials.

It’ll be interesting to see what they do when they see women in string bikinis, or going topless.

————————

Please note there will be no podcast this morning since I have laryngitis.

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Filed Under: al-Qaeda, Barack Obama, Caribbean, China, terrorism Tagged With: Bermuda, Fausta's blog, Gitmo, Uighurs

May 30, 2009 By Fausta

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.

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Filed Under: al-Qaeda, Barack Obama, terrorism Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Gitmo, Guantánamo, Uighurs, World Trade Center

May 21, 2009 By Fausta

Obama’s speech: The war on al Qaeda?

As you already know, I was a panelist on today’s CNN bloggers’ roundtable. The subject was Pres. Obama’s speech on national security, a speech which raises more questions than it answers.

090521_obama_security_ap_297There are a number of interesting items in the speech:

First, the Obama administration had previously changed the term “war on terror” to “overseas contingency operations”. In today’s speech Obama asserted that

  • “We are indeed at war with al Qaeda and its affiliates.”
  • “We are building new partnerships around the world to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates.”
  • “Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States,and those that we capture — like other prisoners of war — must be prevented from attacking us again.”
  • “And I do know with certainty that we can defeat al Qaeda.”

So, does this mean the “war on terror” should be called “the war on al Qaeda”?

And the specific statement, “like other prisoners of war”, raises the issue whether the Obama administration is considering changing the detainees’ status to that of POWs.

Obama categorically asserts that that enhanced interrogation techniques

“did not advance our war and counterterrorism efforts– they undermined them, and that is why I ended them once and for all.”

A statement that is also accompanied with his apparent eagerness for

“declassifying more information and embracing more oversight of our actions, and we’re narrowing our use of the state secrets privilege”

Yet at the same time, the Obama administration will not declassify or release any CIA memos explaining the effectiveness of the very interrogation techniques that Obama categorically asserts are totally ineffective.

Another interesting point came up when Obama talked about five categories of Guantanamo detainees; specifically talking about prosecuting terrorists who have violated American criminal laws in federal courts. What is particularly interesting is that both terrorists he named, Ramzi Yousef and Zacarias Moussaoui, were never in Guantanamo: Youself was captured in Pakistan and sent to New York, and Mussaoui was captured in Minnesota.

Closing Gitmo? Where’s the plan?
Supermax prisons taking Gitmo detainees? Which ones?
“New legal regime to detain terrorists”? Where’s the plan?

While Obama predictably managed to work in as much blame on “the prior eight years” as possible, my question is, does that mean he is saying that his own party, which has controlled Congress for the past two years, is derelict?

And one final touch of irony,
From the text of the speech, it appears that the President prefers to believe that Gitmo, enhanced interrogations and the such are what makes the terrorists hate us. Gitmo didn’t exist on September 11, 2001. Terrorists, including al Qaeda, are motivated by an ideology that despises everything we believe in: women’s rights, the rule of law, freedom of speech, religion and sexual orientation, and Israel’s right to exist – anti-Semitism being one of the motives of the four homegrown jihadists arrested in New York this morning.

Obama says that fearmongering is good for “30-second commercials”, on the same day that the FBI thwarted a terrorist attack.

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Filed Under: Barack Obama, CIA, Democrats Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Gitmo, Guantánamo

March 27, 2009 By Fausta

Hiding the story with the headlines

As you may be aware of, I do the Carnival of Latin America weekly. The easiest way to do the Carnival is to go through my news and blog feeds, and save up the stories throughout the week.

Today’s headline caught my attention, of course, since I have been posting on the Mexican drug wars for a while:
Official: Mexico not in danger of collapse

The Mexican government is not on the verge of collapse, the top U.S. intelligence official said Thursday, seeking to tamp down increasing alarm over the powerful and violent drug cartels operating in the country that is the United States’ southern neighbor.

“Mexico is in no danger of becoming a failed state,” said National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair at his first news conference Thursday.

Echoing the assessment of Mexico’s leaders, Blair said the dramatic increase in killings in Mexico is a result of that government’s crackdown on drug cartels.

A U.S. military planning report issued in January warned that the escalating violence is dangerously destabilizing Mexico and warned its government could collapse. But Blair said there is no danger of that.

Nevertheless, the Obama administration announced Tuesday that it will dispatch nearly 500 more federal agents to the border, along with X-ray machines and drug-sniffing dogs, to stop the spillover of violence into the U.S. from Mexican drug smugglers and immigrant smugglers. National Guardsmen might also be sent.

Alright. This is not exactly ground-breaking news. It’s been in the works for a while.

The real story is this:

During his news conference, Blair also said the Obama administration is still wrestling with what to do with the remaining 240 detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, which the president has ordered closed.

Some of the detainees, deemed non-threatening, may be released into the United States as free men, Blair confirmed.

That would happen when they can’t be returned to their home countries, because the governments either won’t take them or the U.S. fears they will be abused or tortured. That is the case with 17 Uighers (WEE’-gurz), Chinese Muslim separatists who were cleared for release from the jail long ago. The U.S. can’t find a country willing to take them, and it will not turn them over to China.

Blair said the former prisoners would have get some sort of assistance to start their new lives in the United States.

Uh?

Gitmo alumni may be released in the US as free men? And then get welfare?

Thomas Joscelyn at the Weekly Standard has a number of questions:

(1) Does this mean that the Obama administration is planning on giving some freed Guantanamo detainees a stipend? It sure appears that way. So, not only is the Obama administration planning on freeing some detainees on U.S. soil, it is also going to pay them to live here. Amazing. Who would have thought that we would see the day when detainees who were once labeled enemy combatants would be receiving welfare?

(2) The Uighur detainees are cited, over and over again, as the types of detainees who can be safely released into the U.S. This conclusion has been reached through a combination of specious reasoning and ignorance.

None of the 17 Uighurs are master terrorists on par with the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They were mostly new recruits at the time of their capture. However, as I have argued before, they are all affiliated with and/or members of a designated terrorist organization, received training at a training camp in the al Qaeda/Taliban stronghold of Tora Bora, and have admitted that they were trained by two known terrorists. And, on top of that, the group that trained them threatened to attack the Olympic Games in China last year.

Even if you don’t think that we should lock them up and throw away the key, do we really want to pay them to live on U.S. soil?

(3) The AP says the United States can’t find a country to take the Uighurs, other than China, which may treat them harshly. But that really remains to be seen. Ireland, for example, has apparently offered to take some Guantanamo detainees. Other European nations have been somewhat more reticent.

(4) Is the Obama administration considering paying other Guantanamo detainees to live in the U.S. as well?

What next? Granting Raul Castro asylum in Palm Beach when his regime finally collapses?

Or will Raul have to settle for West Palm?

That aside, it’s interesting how AP chooses to hide one story under a headline involving a less immediately important story.

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Filed Under: 9/11, Barack Obama, terrorism Tagged With: Dennis Blair, Fausta's blog, Gitmo, Guantánamo

March 19, 2009 By Fausta

Gitmo detainees may be released into US

Guantanamo Detainees May Be Released in U.S.

Attorney General Eric Holder said some detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may end up being released in the U.S. as the Obama administration works with foreign allies to resettle some of the prisoners.

Peachy.

Let’s get the Gitmo alumni substandard mortgages under the Community Reinvestment Act guidelines (which are still law) and move them next door to Eric’s.

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Filed Under: 9/11, terrorism Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Gitmo, Guantánamo

January 14, 2009 By Fausta

Gitmo alumni return to their vocation

Gateway Pundit has the story:

Former Gitmo detainee Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi recently exploded in Iraq.
Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi was released from Gitmo in November 2005.

He was one of many.

More at Reuters: Pentagon: 61 ex-Guantanamo inmates return to terrorism

Morrell said the latest figures, current through December 24, showed an 11 percent recidivism rate, up from 7 percent in a March 2008 report that counted 37 former detainees as suspected or confirmed active militants.

As Rusty puts it,

I don’t mind closing Gitmo. House the SOBs somewhere else. Better yet, hang them for violating the Geneva Conventions. I really don’t care.

But please — I’m on my knees begging you — don’t suffer any illusions about who these guys are.

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Filed Under: 9/11, terrorism Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Gitmo

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