Chinese Muslims Freed From Guantanamo Ten Years After Being Found Innocent

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/12/31/3108621/uighurs-guantanamo-freedom/

well there's some more humans that the right wing can hate on i have to admit i had not heard of these people until i spotted this articles. will republicans now insist on Chinese immigrants be spied on or waterboarded? 

The last of 22 Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic group concentrated in Western China, were freed from Guantanamo Bay, according to an announcement from the Pentagon on Tuesday. Their freedom comes ten years after the U.S. military determined that the men posed no threat to American national security.

Slovakia agreed to repatriate Yusef Abbas, Hajiakbar Abdulghupur, and Saidullah Khalik, who could not be transferred to the U.S. mainland because of Congressional restrictions. The decision is consistent with the Guantanamo approach codified in the newly signed2014 National Defense Authorization Act, 

which maintains the ban on transferring detainees to the United States while increasing the president’s power to transfer detainees to other nations.

The deal with Slovakia is a comparatively happy ending to a terribly sad saga. The 22 Uighurs rounded up by the United States in 2001 were fleeing brutal persecution in China, which represses the mere expression of Uighur religion and culture as a matter of policy. 

“At its most extreme,” Human Rights Watch documented in 2005, “peaceful [Uighur] activists practicing their religion in ways that the Party and government deem unacceptable are arrested, tortured, and at times executed.”

The now-released Guantanamo inmates ran to Taliban-controlled regions of Afghanistan, where there were preexisting Uighur communities, and hence were rounded up during the first year of the war in Afghanistan as suspected transnational terrorists. 

“When the Uighurs were turned over to the United States, they thought that they had been saved,” J. Wells Dixon, a lawyer representing some of the inmates, told PBS.

 It took two years for the U.S. military to acknowledge its mistake. In 2003, the New York Times’ Charlie Savage reports, military officials decided the Uighur inmates were “not affiliated with Al Qaeda or a Taliban leader” and hence should be released from custody.

But the mechanism for release was tricky. They couldn’t be sent back to China, and there were tremendous domestic political pressures against releasing them into the United States. So, for some time, they continued to be held as prisoners in Guantanamo, despite demonstrably posing no threat to the United States.

In 2005, a military tribunal ruled the Uighurs were “not enemy combatants” and hence should be released. One of their lawyers asked that they be allowed to live in a hotel in Guantanamo until a permanent place for them could be found, a request the Department of Defense denied. Three years later, a civilian court ruled that all remaining Uighurs be transferred to the United States to live freely, a ruling overturned on the Obama Administration’s appeal.

the price for freedom of some can be a hell for another, innocence seems to fall under that lock down first and when you get time check it out, medieval times did that reasonable to assume first man did the same in their way, it's always been about the strong survive but the Bible says "the meek shall inherit the earth.  is that being ignored or just no fear or belief of God?

people fear what they don't know denial of such things only makes the reality of them more of an impact.