Are you a bitter clinger? One of those American gun owners belittled by Sen. Barack Obama, filled with antipathy for people who aren’t like you? You know, people like foreign Muslims whose idea of a few weeks’ vacation is a course of paramilitary training at an al-Qaeda-affiliated camp? Well, if you are, you’ll be pleased to know that an appellate judge — one of the Obama philosophical bent that will be seeded throughout the federal courts if the Senator is elected president two weeks from now — thinks you are every bit as dangerous as those trained terrorists. Such is the latest lesson in the saga of the 17 Uighur detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.
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The good news is that a divided panel of the federal appeals court in Washington has, at least for the moment, stayed district judge Ricardo Urbina’s order that these trained jihadists be released into the United States. The bad news is that the panel was divided, 2-1. And, to put it mildly, the reasoning of the dissenting judge, Clinton appointee Judith W. Rogers, is astounding. The case will be argued to the appeals court on November 24. Some quick background: The Uighurs are Chinese Muslims captured by coalition forces after the American invasion of Afghanistan. The men are jihadist trainees, all of whom received instruction in the paramilitary camps of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement — a designated terrorist organization affiliated with al-Qaeda. The military has taken an incoherent position on the Uighurs, the sum of its haste to empty the much maligned Gitmo plus its stubborn, politically correct disregard for the tenets of jihadist ideology. Thus, these detainees are deemed not to be a threat to the United States, only to China, yet somehow still to be “enemy combatants.” Meanwhile, the State Department is desperately trying to find a country willing to accept the men. (State has previously persuaded Albania to take five other Uighur detainees.) Though China would gladly take the Uighurs, U.S. treaty obligations forbid such repatriation because we have reason to think they’d be persecuted there. Moreover, because no other country wants trouble with the Chicoms, none is willing to step up to the plate to relieve our quandary.
