Yesterday, Jed Babbin at HumanEvents.com reported that there is some tension within the Obama administration over how to handle the seventeen Uighur detainees held at Gitmo. Reportedly, the inter-agency review team President Obama authorized has concluded that the Uighurs are too dangerous to release into the United States. However, high-level officials in the Obama administration have previously said that they wanted to free the Uighurs on American soil and even give them assistance to adjust to their new lives. According to Babbin, some Obama officials are not too happy with the inter-agency review board’s findings, as it gets in the way of their release plans. There was another twist in the Uighur detainees’ story yesterday as well. The U.S. Treasury Department designated Abdul Haq, who runs the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Party (“ETIP”), a terrorist. The Treasury Department’s designation came less than one week after the UN itself designated Haq a terrorist with ties to Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, or the Taliban. The ETIP and its predecessor, the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (“ETIM”), are quite obviously terrorist organizations as they openly brandish al Qaeda’s flag. But there has been some denial with respect to their mission and activities. Some prefer to pretend that the detainees are simply opposed to China’s repressive regime, and, therefore, the ETIP/ETIM’s obvious jihadist bent is often overlooked. This has been a consistent theme in the press’s reporting on the Uighur detainees. (See a more complete rebuttal to this line of argument here and here.) Treasury’s designation should clear up any confusion about the ETIP/ETIM. But, this causes some additional problems for the Obama officials that want to release them. All seventeen of the Uighur detainees are alleged to have been members or associates of the ETIP/ETIM. And there is strong evidence, including the detainees’ own admissions, that they were in fact affiliated with the organization. And here’s an additional problem for the Obama administration: A number of the Uighur detainees held at Gitmo have openly admitted that Abdul Haq ran the terrorist training camp they attended in the Tora Bora Mountains. Time and again the detainees admitted that they were personally trained by either Abdul Haq or his former partner in crime, Hassan Mahsum, who was the leader of the ETIM before he was killed in Waziristan in 2003. How, then, can the administration contemplate releasing detainees into the U.S. who have admitted they were trained by a designated terrorist?
