Will wonders never cease! Who would think that the Obama administration wouldn’t be eager to settle a group of Chinese terrorists in your neighborhood? Andy McCarthy reports at National Review:
The Obama Justice Department told the Supreme Court this evening that the Uighurs have no right to be released into the United States.
The Uighurs, Chinese Muslim detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, received terrorist training at al Qaeda affiliated camps (from an organization formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization under U.S. law) and were captured after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. They are the Left’s combatant cause célèbre. The military took the incoherent position that they were trained al Qaeda terrorists but that their real beef was with China, not us. Thus, the federal courts have held that they are not enemy combatants. The government has been trying to relocate them for years but no country will take the remaining 17 — other than China, where our treaty obligations arguably forbid us from sending them because there is reason to believe they’d be persecuted.
We’ve posted a lot about the Uighurs. I’d put a link to our posts, but WordPress has taken away our search function, I hope temporarily.
One insane judge actually ordered the Uighurs released into the United States, but the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed his decision.
The Uighurs appealed, and today the Justice Department filed its responsive brief. Solicitor General Elena Kagan argued — consistent with the Bush administration position — that the Uighurs have no right to be released into the U.S.
It makes me laugh every time Obama adopts a policy that was held by the Bush administration on terrorism. Sometimes reality is so strong that it overcomes even leftist ideology. In this case, McCarthy concludes:
Watch tomorrow as our usual conservative commentator suspects insist that we must give President Obama great credit for doing the right thing for national security — and conveniently ignore that the President tends to do the right thing only after knuckle-dragging right-wingers push back against his (and his Justice Department’s) reliable inclination to do the wrong thing.
I’d say that it’s not just we knuckle-dragging right-wingers in this case. It was a lot of ordinary Americans horrified at the idea of terrorist prisoners being released into their neighborhoods and letting their representatives in Congress know about it.