Newt Gingrich
Let's NOT meet the Uighurs
By: Newt Gingrich
Examiner Columnist
May 15, 2009
President Obama has heeded his generals and decided not to release more photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, and good for him. Now he needs to put our national security ahead of politics once again and reverse his dangerous decision to release trained terrorists currently held at Guantanamo Bay into American suburbs.
America, meet the Uighurs.
Seventeen of the 241 terrorist detainees currently being held at Guantanamo Bay are Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs. These Uighurs have been allied with and trained by al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups. The goal of the Uighurs is to establish a separate sharia state.
As part of their ongoing effort to close Guantanamo Bay, the Obama administration has had to figure out what to do with the Uighurs. Officials believe that if they’re sent back to China they will be persecuted, and no third country will take them.
So the Obama administration has decided to set the Uighurs loose in America. Most likely, the lucky community that will soon be hosting the Uighurs is a neighborhood near you: Fairfax Country Virginia, where there is already a sizable (non-terrorist) Uighur community.
But the Obama administration’s plan for the Uighurs doesn’t stop there. At Guantanamo Bay, the Uighurs are known for picking up television sets on which women with bared arms appear and hurling them across the room.
Perhaps understandably, the Obama administration believes the Uighurs will need help getting adjusted to northern Virginia society, in which women with bared arms have been known to appear.
So last month Obama Administration Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair indicated that terrorist detainees released into the United States would receive public assistance. “You can’t just put them on the street,” he said.
By their own admission, Uighurs being held at Guantanamo Bay are members of or associated with the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), an al Qaeda-affiliated group designated as a terrorist organization under U.S law.
The goal of the ETIM is to establish a radical Islamist state in Asia. Last year, during the Beijing Olympics, the ETIM released a video in which an ETIM member stood in front of an al Qaeda flag and threatened anyone who attended the games.
Prior to 9/11, the Uighurs received jihadist training in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, a known al Qaeda and Taliban training ground. What’s more, they were trained, most likely in the weapons, explosives and ideology of mass killing, by Abdul Haq, a member of al Qaeda’s shura, or top advisory council. President Obama’s own interagency review board found that at least some of the Uighurs are dangerous.
Notwithstanding the paramount threat posed by the Uighurs, defending them and other terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay has become the trendy thing to do among leftwing civil liberties groups and private practice lawyers looking for fashionable pro bono work.
As a matter of fact, Attorney General Eric Holder’s law firm, Covington and Burlington, represents 17 Yemenis and one Pakistani currently being held at Guantanamo. In all, about a dozen Obama Justice Department lawyers are from private law firms that represent terrorist detainees.
These are the same officials who, led by Holder, are charged with determining the future home of terrorist detainees after Guantanamo closes. As former Federal Prosecutor Andy McCarthy writes, “has it dawned on people yet that it's a huge problem to have a Justice Department stocked with lawyers who have spent (or whose firms have spent) the last eight years volunteering their services to America’s enemies?”
As you would expect, this army of leftwing activists and high-priced lawyers has led a public relations offense on behalf of the Uighurs to convince nervous suburbanites that the former terrorist detainees will make great neighbors. They claim that the Uighurs are harmless Chinese separatists who have been unjustly detained. Their real problem is with the repressive Chinese government, they claim, not us.
But as you can see, the truth about the Uighurs (which you definitely won’t hear from the anti-Guantanamo legal industry) is very different. Contrary to the claims of their defenders, the Guantanamo Uighurs are not pro-democracy activists unjustly held by American authorities.
Even if you accept the argument made by their defenders that the Uighurs’ true targets are Chinese, not Americans, it does nothing to change the fact that they are trained mass killers instructed by the same terrorists responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.
They have no place in American communities.
So congratulations to President Obama for defying his radical leftwing base and refusing to release the prisoner abuse photos. Now he should do the same with the Uighurs.
Examiner columnist Newt Gingrich is the author, with Jackie Gingrich Cushman, of 5 Principles for a Successful Life: From Our Family to Yours.
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