Innocent Uighur migrants languish in detention

The New Standard, a new progressive web-based paper, offers an exclusive report on the situation of about two-dozen Uighur detainees in Guantanamo, who were picked up in Afghanistan in 2001. The New Standard story focuses on two Uighur men, with Chinese nationality, who the US originally claimed were Islamic militants, allegedly in Afghanistan receiving training by the Taliban. These false allegations presumed that they wanted to return to Western China, and create a militant, Uighur nationalist movement for independence from Beijing.

The Uighur men maintain their story that they were only passing through Afghanistan on their way to Turkey, that it was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is no evidence of these men's connection to the Taliban. But as the Chinese government is extremely suspicious of Uighur people (and indeed represses Uighur nationalism with more ferocity than Tibetan nationalism), the detainees were left to languish.

The New Standard claims that the US government's own hearings for the men, in late March, found them to be non-combatants, and that there were to be no charges against the two Uighurs. And yet, as late as the end of July, lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, met with the men, still treated like prionsers, shackled to the ground in small windowless rooms in Guantanamo. According to the CCR, "Since [the March hearing] the government has failed to notify their attorneys, families or anyone else of the men's innocence, instead allowing them to remain in detention for an additional six months."