At least, that headline is the meme I expect most conservative blogs and their Leaders (Rush the Persecuted, O’Reilly the Terrible, and St. Glenn of the Weeping Beck) to employ when they spin this story about the US Supreme Court finally granting the Uighurs (an ethnic group of Muslims in China) a review of their case seeking to challenge their detention by the US Military despite being determined to be no threat to the United States.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court said Tuesday it will hear a new case about the rights of Guantanamo detainees, this time involving prisoners who remain in custody even after the Pentagon determines they’re not a threat to the United States.
The high court said it will take a challenge from Chinese Muslims at the U.S. naval base in Cuba who are asking the court to put some teeth into a June 2008 ruling that said federal judges could ultimately order some detainees to be released, depending on security concerns and other circumstances.
The 13 Chinese Muslims, or Uighurs, who remain at Guantanamo have been cleared by the Pentagon for release since 2004, yet have been held roughly eight years.
A federal appeals court overturned a judge’s order to give the Uighurs their freedom, saying judges lacked authority to order detainees released into the United States.
The Obama administration oddly enough is fighting any review by the Supreme Court, apparently on the grounds that it will mess up their strategy to negotiate a possible destination to send the Uighurs. But I say, bully for the Court. Some fundamental principles are more important than inconveniencing any administration. One of those is the right of people being held unlawfully by the government to challenge that detention. We are big about our “freedoms” here in America. It’s what every right winger I know claims we are doing by sending soldiers to kill and be killed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Defending our freedoms.
Well, this is about as fundamental a right, as great a “freedom” as there could possibly be: the right to be free, period. Free from imprisonment. Free to challenge that imprisonment when the governmental authorities holding you in a concentration camp refuse to allow you to petition a court for your release, even though they have determined you committed no crime for which imprisonment is justified, and represent no threat to the society that has held you in cruel bondage. Detention that involved torture and abuse on a regular basis. If we, as a country refuse the Uighurs their day in Court, we have lost that freedom guaranteed under our Constitution. It’s just a worthless promise on a piece of paper to paraphrase former President Bush.
I thank the Justices of the Supreme Court for taking the case, and I hope and pray they do the right thing and rule for the immediate release of the remaining Uighur detainees so that what so many innocent people like them endured at Guantanamo Bay over the last eight years can never happen again in this country.
