This is a prime example of why I no longer subscribe to the Washington Post after two decades of doing so. Yesterday’s editorial, “Justice for Uighurs, Chinese Muslim detaineees should be welcomed into the United States,” is muddled and demonstrates that Leftwing do-gooders still drive the WaPo. As I read the editorial, I wished the Uighurs, all 17 of them, could be relocated to the author’s street.
If you don’t know the facts about the Uighurs, please read our many previous posts here.
The Post begins:
FOR THE PAST seven years, 17 men have been held at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detainees who the U.S. government acknowledges should never have been there. They are not enemies of the United States or its allies and have not engaged in violence against U.S. or other interests. Yet these men — ethnic Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs — continue to be prisoners of years-old mistakes, ancient hostilities and modern-day diplomatic failures.
The Washington Post fails to tell readers that these poor misunderstood men didn’t just drop from the sky into the custody of the US, they were captured in Afghanistan. Were they there on a little vacation from the troubled Chinsese region where they are wanted for terrorism?
China wants them back, so Obama will be inviting official Chinese anger to be rained down on us just at a time when he and Miss Hillary are begging the Chinese to further bail us out of our financial woes. But, of course, the Washington Post denies the harmless Uighurs are part of an Islamic separatist movment in China.
The United States cannot return the men to China for fear that they will be mistreated or even tortured; the Chinese government considers them part of a terrorist group and has itself detained or abused Uighurs even when there was no evidence that they engaged in violence. The Bush administration tried for years to find the Uighurs a home in a third country, but to no avail; the Chinese government has threatened to retaliate politically against any nation that offers the Uighurs a haven.
The editorial hammers home the point over and over again (count the number of times!) that they are innocent. Read the entire editorial.
In the meantime, 17 innocent men will continue to be confined on an island naval base ringed by barbed wire.
Washington Post, make up your mind! Are they innocent or not? Check this out, after repeatedly telling us they were innocent, here is how they cover their ass in case they don’t turn out to be such nice fellows afterall.
We have previously urged the administration to accept one or two of the detainees as a show of good faith and in an effort to spur ambivalent allies to take in the others. But the time has come for the United States to accept full responsibility for wrongly holding the Uighurs and to act boldly to rectify this miscarriage of justice. President Obama should grant asylum to all of the Uighur detainees, subject to confirmation that they have not engaged in any acts of violence.
What!!!! You just spent I don’t know how many words telling us they are harmless!
As I said, I wonder if they could be resettled in the editor’s “welcoming” neighborhood.