hot potatoes

Despite ever-louder calls for closing Guantanamo from high-ranking officials in European countries, said countries have been refusing to take in detainees that hold legal residency (but not citizenship) there. See the WP article here.

I find this article a little confusing. For instance, there are 10 legal British residents locked up at Guantanamo (according to the US). US officials floated a proposal to see if Britain would be willing to take them back. "Court papers show that Britain nixed the idea, saying it would be too costly and difficult to meet US conditions to keep the men under constant surveillance." So, are these guys terrorists, or not? If they are, why are we releasing them? Why don't we try them and sentence them? If they're not, why do they have to be under "constant surveillance"? Are we not sure? After four years of detention, we're not sure who these guys are or what they mean? That doesn't really build confidence in the way that we're going about this whole "war on terror" thing.

Take another case from this article: Murat Kurnaz, Turkish citizen, German resident (born and raised). He failed to renew his German residency while he was locked up in Guantanamo and that is the official reason Germany gave for not taking him back after the US suggested releasing him. The article says that "US military intelligence and German law enforcement officials had largely concluded there was no information tying [Kurnaz] to al-Qaeda or terrorist activities". New-ish German chancellor Angela Merkel reopened the case and wanted to take him back, but the US still insisted he be under 24-hour surveillance. The German government refused, the US eventually relented, and the guy was finally released in August, after four extra years in Guantanamo. Poor, poor guy. The question still remains, though: why would the US insist he be kept under such constant surveillance if they had concluded he wasn't a terrorist?

Maybe the US is afraid that Guantanamo will turn people into terrorists. That's the best idea I can come up with.

The saddest case in the article, I think, is the 22 unfortunate Uighurs. China wants them back so it can treat them even worse than it treats the rest of the Uighur population there. After lots of begging, Albania agreed to take in 5. European governments and others ("100 other nations") are balking because of pressure from China. The US seems not even to be considering giving them political asylum in the US. Meanwhile, through all the political cartwheeling, these 17 people get to just sit, day after day, in a pen in Cuba, NOT GUILTY.