Andy McCarthy led the 1995 prosecution of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others for their bombing of the World Trade Center and other planned attacks, and assisted in other prosecutions of terrorists. He is now the head of the Center for Law and Counterrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He knows what he’s talking about when it comes to terrorism. So when he says someone is a terrorist, I take him seriously. Here’s how he begins his post at National Review’s Corner, The Uighurs Are Coming, the Uighurs Are Coming! :
Despite being steeped in jihadist ideology, trained in explosives and assassination tactics, and anxious enough to get that way that they high-tailed it from China to Afghanistan to become more lethal terrorists, the Uighur Muslim detainees will be released by the Obama administration into the United States, according to this Los Angeles Times report. After all, the president has promised to close Guantanamo Bay this year, and that promise can’t be fulfilled unless we release the jihadists since many of them can’t be tried.
McCarthy references this report on the Uighurs from Thomas Jocelyn, which leaves no doubt that they are terrorists. He points out that “federal statutory law … makes aliens excludable from the U.S. if they have received terrorist training or been affiliated with a terrorist organization.”
The LA Times’s story reports that four former Uighur prisoners are in Albania and one has moved from there to Sweden. They have been living their peacefully. Maybe those countries easily accommodate people who act like this:
Not long after being granted access to TV [because they are considered nonthreatening prisoners at Gitmo, though they took part in a riot], 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.
Yup, just the kind of people we want. And did the officials take away their TV privileges or otherwise punish them? Hah!
Since then, officials at Guantanamo have bolted down the TVs and shown pre-taped programs, editing out any images they thought Uighurs might find offensive.
I suppose the government could assign each Uighur an aide who would remove everything offensive before the Uighur could see it. Would you like one of these guys to move in next door? Let’s hear from some of our apologists for multiculturalism.
See our previous posts on the Uighurs here.
Addendum: Right after I posted the above, I came across this article by Jed Babbin. It begins:
White House lawyers are refusing to accept the findings of an inter-agency committee that the Uighur Chinese Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay are too dangerous to release inside the U.S., according to Pentagon sources familiar with the action.
It continues:
….Reviewing the Uighurs detention, the inter-agency panel found that they weren’t the ignorant, innocent goatherds the White House believed them to be. The committee determined they were too dangerous to release because they were members of the ETIM terrorist group, the “East Turkistan Islamic Movement,” and because their presence at the al-Queda training camp was no accident. There is now no ETIM terrorist cell in the United States: there will be one if these Uighurs are released into the United States.
According to Defense Department sources, the White House legal office has told the inter-agency review group to re-do their findings to come up with the opposite answer.
But what does reality matter when it comes to what Obama wants?