Who Are the Six Uighurs Released From Guantánamo to Palau?

by Andy Worthington, November 04, 2009

http://original.antiwar.com/worthington/2009/11/03/who-are-the-six-uighurs-released/

Over the weekend, six of the remaining 13 Uighurs in Guantánamo – Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province – were released to resume new lives in the tiny Pacific nation of Palau (population: 20,000).

I have written at length about the plight of Guantánamo’s Uighurs, innocent men caught up in the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, who were mostly seized and sold to U.S. forces by Pakistani villagers after fleeing a settlement in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains where they had been living Spartan lives for several months, free from Chinese oppression.

Some were hoping to make their way to Turkey, to find work, but had found their way hard and had been advised to seek out the settlement; others nursed futile dreams of rising up against the Chinese government, and, while working to make the settlement habitable, occasionally shot a few rounds on their only weapon, an aged Kalashnikov.

I have also written about how the U.S. authorities knew, almost immediately, that these men had no connection to either al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but how, nevertheless, they flew them to Guantánamo, allowed Chinese interrogators to visit them, and tried, in their tribunals at Guantánamo, to make out that they were connected to a Uighur separatist group, which obligingly had been designated by the Bush administration as a terrorist group to secure leverage with the Chinese government in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

Article continued on :

http://merryabla64.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/who-are-the-six-uighurs-released-from-guantanamo-to-palau/