Sorry For the Detainment, Here's a Laptop 218
A select group of 17 Uighur Muslims held in Guantánamo, and waiting for a nation to grant them asylum are getting laptops and web training from the US military. Their web training will take place in a virtual computer lab the military has set up. The lessons will be limited to DVD language training as well as a basic users skill — set to help in any future employment options. Nury Turkel, an Uighur rights activist, said the training would help the men "be reintroduced into a modern society," adding that it "also would give hope to the men that their freedom is nearing." This special group already gets to order fast food and use a phone booth for weekly calls. I think the government is on to something here. Nothing keeps a man pacified like an occasional phone call, a cheeseburger, and surfing for a little porn.
Missing option... (Score:3, Funny)
an occasional phone call, a cheeseburger, and surfing for a little porn
I dunno. I can only eat, chat, and fap so much. But I could play CivIII [civfanatics.com] day and night.
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Eat, fat, and chapped?
Sounds remarkably like my lovelife.
Surfing a little porn (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing keeps a man pacified like an occasional phone call, a cheeseburger, and surfing for a little porn.
Tell my boss that. He won't let me surf porn or make personal calls at work. Cheeseburgers are alright though.
Re:Surfing a little porn (Score:4, Funny)
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For call girls, surfing for porn is great, the occasional phone call comes in, and cheeseburgers are not allowed for the potential effect on revenue.
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I could not even get a Cheeseburger at work. You had to eat outside the office. No food allowed inside. Except for the boss.
You would walk past his office some days hungry as fuck and smell McDonalds, or Jack in the Box and still have an hour to go before you could leave.
Total Prick.
future employment options (Score:2, Funny)
I dunno, I'm sure some of their resumes are stocked full of skills that some countries would be interested in.
Uighurs (Score:5, Interesting)
For those not in the know, these prisoners are a tough case. The Chinese don't want them back (they're nasty separatist rebels to them), and they don't want to go back to China as it is for fear of waking up one morning with a bullet in their heads. They really don't belong in Gitmo -- they're not full-on Al Qaeda. Nobody in the US wants to grant them asylum because they're former gitmo detainees. The last thing the US wants is to release them to somebody like Yemen or Saudi Arabia, where they can become full-on Al Qaeda. A US judge said they have to be released, but didn't specify to which country. This whole thing is just a mess...
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Actually, there is only one thing to be done with these people: take them into the USA, compensate them for their wrongful imprisonment, and finally allow them the chance to live a life of freedom. In other words, ATONE for what you did to them.
Any upstanding American should be ashamed of what his or her country has done and still is doing to these men. Let all the NIMBYs fuck off, too - if I lived in the USA, I'd gladly have these people in my neighbourhood, and I'd show them what America is REALLY like. I
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There's no profit in peacetime for friends of friends of the Pentagon.
Re:Uighurs (Score:4, Insightful)
Eight years of illegal imprisonment and, so far the get to use laptops but likely not to keep them and free access to junk food, damn those must be some pretty pricey computers and some really good junk food. Just give them free access to civil suit lawyers and a couple of years to make use of them. Once they are millionaires there will be plenty of countries who want to take them ;).
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There is only one place left to send them now.
Azeroth.
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a political problem, not legal (Score:5, Insightful)
There is not a real problem here. I'm a former refugee (along with my family), lived with tortured persons, and families of political prisoners and know there are international laws and conventions that define what to do when you have people not welcomed in their own country. This false problem is because the US don't have the political will to apply those conventions after the mess they have created.
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They're not full-on Al Quaeda, you got that right. They aren't remotely Al Quaeda.
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How do we treak "regular" foreign criminals? If returning them to their country of origin is a danger to their lives, don't they get asylum in US?
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Okay, but my point is that ad hoc, extralegal "justice" erodes the actual justice system. The entire government justification for Guantanamo undermines confidence in the judiciary and places more unconstitutional power in the hands of the executive. These things have far-reaching, currently under-appreciated consequences.
Sorry? (Score:5, Funny)
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Maybe they could work in IT (Score:5, Funny)
Spoken by quite a few across the globe (Score:2)
Also spoken in Afghanistan, Australia, Germany, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Turkey (Asia), USA, Uzbekistan.
Gold Farmers? (Score:3, Funny)
article calls it a "virtual" computer lab (Score:2)
and how is the lab different from a non-virtual computer lab? do they login with their laptops and run a program that simulates a computer lab?
Computers?...put them to work! (Score:3, Insightful)
Doesn't seem right (Score:2)
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Please define rule of law.
Military? Or do you mean the Constitution, for which does not apply to them?
Bravo (Score:2)
Is America bound by any international treaty concerning warfare and the treatment of prisoners, which according to the constitution, must be followed? You should probably read the Geneva Conventions, Common Article 3. And then the Constitution.
If we want out of a treaty, I'm pretty sure that a memo sent between cabinet members and other appointed officials isn't quite kosher. I'll Godwin myself a little here: every totalitarian state provides legal pretext for it's actions, no matter how outlandishly concei
Re:Computers?...put them to work! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well you're probably not the *only* one, but consider a couple of things: 1) International law takes a dim view of putting war prisoners into forced labor. It's not something you just go and do without expecting some major outcry from the international "community" 2) I wonder about the cost of guarding prisoners while they work, as opposed to the cost of guarding them in 23-h
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Re:Computers?...put them to work! (Score:4, Insightful)
If you care about wasted money... (Score:2)
We're spending about $30,000 a second for warfare. That's probably a little too much.
Let's put it another way - every time you hear about a missile strike in Afghanistan or Pakistan, they are using Hellfire missiles, which are $70,000 a piece. We've lost 70 of the drones in action in the last decade or so, which are 9 million each, not including the ammunition that went down with them. They require a team of 55 people to operate, according to Wikipedia, and I can't even guess how much they cost each minute
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Just like the innocent Nazis were kidnapped when they were caught on the battlefield or after contributing in a significant way to the Nazi party.
The captured Nazis also were subject to the Geneva Convention. And from what I've been told, there was this MASSIVE and somewhat important TRIAL after the war... Something called Nuremberg, or some such.
OLPT (Score:4, Funny)
One laptop per terrorist!
Mod me down you wonderful bastards, it's called comedy!
Getting ready for a job in the IT world.... (Score:2)
Sounds like a typical day of work.
We Apologize for the Inconvenience (Score:2)
Cool! (Score:2)
What do I have to do to get in there?
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Nitpicking Article Summary (Score:2, Funny)
"DVD language training"? Shouldn't that be "DVD-based language training"?
"DVD language training" sounds like there is a special language called "DVD", presumably composed of very long strings of 1's and 0's...
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So ohm... Nobody wants them? I mean seriously, Guantanamo Bay is America's little piece of Cuba but it's a safe bet these men are not from America or Cuba . (Say what you will about Castro, he dose not let anyone else mistreat Cubans.)
What about the countries they originally came from? Do they not want them back? Why? Or is it that they don't want to go back? If so why?
Not passing judgments or anything, just re
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So Castro's like an abusive, jealous spouse? Cool.
Per your question, RTFA or google a bit. If TL;DR, then the take away is that they're from western China and are already members of a persecuted minority. They'll all but certainly be killed if we send them back to China. No one else wants them, or if you read into it a bit, perhaps other countries enjoy leaving us between a rock and a hard place ethically.
Re:Clearly full of spy tools. (Score:4, Informative)
What about the countries they originally came from? Do they not want them back? Why? Or is it that they don't want to go back? If so why?
Oh, most of their countries of origin would love to take them back. Then throw them into jail and torture them. In the specific case of the 17 Uighurs, the country of origin is China. We all know how much China likes members of ethnic minorities, especially if said members were in Afghanistan and could have been subject to terrorist training. The Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] got a bit of background information on the topic.
The Guananamo Uighurs are also a subject of discussion in e.g. Germany. While the possible threat of terrorism is generally assessed as non-existant, the German government tries hard to avoid any quarrels with China. Granting asylum to these detainees would certainly stress the diplomatic relationship between the two countries.
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The Uighurs are a group of people living in China who are not remotely chinese - they are turkish, in looks, speech and religion. Their homeland was annexed by Mao in 1949. They are a lot like Tibetans, in that
1. Their distinct culture has been brutally supressed
2. The Chinese government has promoted settlement in their homelands by majority (Han) Chinese.
3. They desire independence.
The Chinese government labels them terrorists. The Bush regime happily accepted that designation in order to soften Chinese op
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Right, because all possible home countries in the middle east are beacons of enlightenment and tolerance, where no innocent person from a religious or ethnic minority would ever be tortured or killed. /rolls eyes/
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No one said that. Many people who were in Gitmo have been released back to their home countries. So, it does make you wonder why no one will take the ones that are left and awaiting release.
I do think it is up to the US to find somewhere to let these guys go if we are not going to charge them, bu
Re:Clearly full of spy tools. (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA. They are Uighurs (an ethnicity). Chinese government policy (China is their home country) is to execute them on sight.
It only makes you wonder why we won't send them there if you're an idiot.
They fled China to escape persecution, and were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and so wound up at Gitmo.
China has no problem with us sending them back, we have a problem with handing them over for summary execution.
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RTFA. HOME is China for these guys, and the Chinese government policy is to execute them on sight.
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I'm sure what they're doing is fully logged. What better intelligence gathering source that give a bunch of (suspected) terrorists laptops. Once they feel safe with them, they'll go to any online communication method available and try to contact their peers/handlers.
Of course, that's the 10% of them that actually are terrorists. The rest are going to write to try to contact their families and let them know that they're still alive. ... and then look at porn. :)
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Well these lap tops are not surfing the net just yet, but you can bet key loggers are in place.
Re:Right. (Score:5, Insightful)
These people are not considered terrorists. That's why they have to be released sooner rather than later.
They are currently being held because they can't go back to China, and they haven't yet found a place that can give them asylum.
Cheers
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These people are not considered terrorists.
An honest question: how did a bunch of Uighur Muslims with Chinese citizenship even end up where U.S. forces happened to capture them in the first place (Afghanistan/Iraq)? Did they just happen to be touring the country?
Re:Right. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever hear of refugees? Is it strange that persecuted people from a brutal dictatorship would head to a country that practices their religion?
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More accurately, these people are not considered terrorists by the government of the United States. They probably are considered terrorists by the government of China. If the Chinese government refused to return some individuals considered terrorists by the U.S., there would be all kinds of criticism of China for "supporting terrorism" in the popular U.S. media. Now the tables are turned...
It's a funny old world - Muslim separatists fighting the military backed dic
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I agree with you completely... but...
We will never give them asylum. Imagine how the right wing media would run with that. "TERRORISTS ON AMERICAN STREETS!", sure, we know they aren't terrorist, as would anyone with half a brain willing to read up on these things, but the only proof most of America needs to prove that someone is a terrorist (as sadly evident in this very topic) is "zomg they were in Gitmo!"
Can't you just hear the right wing fear machine grinding happily on that for months.
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Despite the judgment of your own court to release them...hmmm
What exactly makes them terrorists - being in Gitmo?
Do yourself a favor and never do anything - anything at all - that might make anybody suspicious, because you know just the suspicion is enough to make you actually guilty.
Re:Right. (Score:5, Informative)
Give a terrorist the tools and knowledge to conspire against us with people around the globe, instantly. What could possibly go wrong?
And herein lies the problem with my dumbass countrymen. So obnoxiously opinionated with an inversely proportional knowledge of the subject at hand. Guess you hadn't heard that we've already released hundreds of innocent "terrorists" from Gitmo?
Re:These ARE FUCKING TERRORISTS what don't you get (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:These ARE FUCKING TERRORISTS what don't you get (Score:4, Insightful)
Pot, kettle.
A lot of the people in gitmo are there because we paid some tribal lord a bunch of money for 'taliban soldiers' and they rounded up whomever they didn't like. So yes, Jamal the goatherder is not a terrorist.
His goats on the other hand... (Score:5, Funny)
... hard core killers.
Re:Terrorism; US responsibility for detainee actio (Score:4, Insightful)
In actuality, these men were found on the battlefield participating in attacks on the US,
If someone invaded my country, I'd be on the battlefield participating in attacks against whoever it was. Its like saying the French Resistance in WWII was a terrorist organization, and was generally unlawful. The only time your allowed to fight an invading military force is if the invaders recognize your legitimacy.
I'm not sure of the reason every singe detainee is there, but I have heard that there was some amount of them who were "enemy combatants", which is a different thing than a terrorist. An "enemy combatant" is a POW who is not subject to the Geneva Convention because they are called "enemy combatants".
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An "enemy combatant" is a POW who is not subject to the Geneva Convention because they are called "enemy combatants".
Uh. NO. They are "enemy combatants" because they fit the legal definition of what a "enemy combatant" is. They are NOT POW's because they fall short of the definition of a POW in several areas, the most obvious is that they were not wearing a uniform. If the Taliban wants Geneva Convention protections, they can issue their "soldiers" uniforms. If they can afford AK-47's and RPGs, they can afford a friggin pair of pants and a shirt!
Re:Terrorism; US responsibility for detainee actio (Score:4, Informative)
That's only if you use an obsolete form of the Geneva Convention. The post-WWII GC RTPOWs (which pretty much all countries recognise; to which the US is also a signatory, though not a subscribing party - it wasn't ratified by the US senate) afford POW status to irregular combatants, who take up arms against an occupying power.
These protections were brought in precisely to cover people like resistance fighters, as the grand-parent says.
Re:These ARE FUCKING TERRORISTS what don't you get (Score:5, Informative)
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"Coalition military intelligence officials estimated that 70% to 90% of prisoners detained in Iraq since the war began last year 'had been arrested by mistake
The calculation in my .sig is based on the assumption that error rates amongst the detainees are no greater than those made by American police officers who shoot the wrong person when discharging a weapon after arriving at the scene of an altercation. That left-wing America-hating organization, the NRA, has done research to document that the cops shoo
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We don't want the NRA on the left, you can have them back.
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Personally, I'm willing to have these people in my neighborhood. The biggest threat to my safety I perceive is from vigilantes bent on finding and killing them, not the prisoners themselves.
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Don't know how you got marked as a troll for that.
I'd prefer that they were carefully vetted before release, but after that I too would be fine with them in my neighborhood. As long as they are forced to open some decent middle eastern restaurants around here.
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troll didn't say they were terrorists when arrested, lets face it even if you didn't hate the US before being shipped to gitmo, you sure as hell would after!
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775 prisoners have been delivered to Guantanamo. Of these, 420 have been released without charge already, and of those that remain only 60 to 80 actually have pending charges. The rest will be freed (once there's somewhere to put them). So, if anything, the accuracy of imprisoning people in Guantanamo is actually worse than general picking up of people in Iraq, not better.
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Accuracy?
Just because the Military chose not to prosecute does not mean these were sweet villagers minding their shops and tending their gardens when "inaccurately" picked up.
They were caught with weapons in hand in combat or with large weapon caches.
The better-safe-than-sorry theory (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because the Military chose not to prosecute does not mean these were sweet villagers minding their shops and tending their gardens when "inaccurately" picked up.
They were caught with weapons in hand in combat or with large weapon caches.
Not really.
In the wake of 9-11, the approach taken was that if it wasn't clear sure whether somebody was a terrorist or not, it was prudent to detain them and try to figure it out the details later.
I can understand this attitude-- it's the "better safe than sorry" approach. It's not the way we do things in the US normally ("I'm not sure if this guy is a criminal or not, so let's arrest him until we can figure it out" wouldn't be allowed by any police force in America), but I can't say that I don't understand the reasoning.
But the consequences of that way of operating is that many, or possibly most, of the people picked up actually aren't terrrorists.
(and the downside of that is that, although they may not have been terrorists before they were detained, five years in Gitmo may very well have changed their attitudes... so "better safe than sorry" may actually make us unsafe, and definitely sorry.)
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They were caught with weapons in hand
How surprising is it to find Afghani males with weapons?
or with large weapon caches.
Again, how unusual would that be in a tribal country that has had no effective national government since the early 1980s?
Hell, if the USA were somehow occupied, the same could be said of many USAsian households (in the south particularly).
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Hell, if the USA were somehow occupied, the same could be said of many USAsian households (in the south particularly).
Sorry, but there is a huge difference between the hand gun and a pump-action 12-gauge you'll find locked in a gun case in your typical American home and the 75 AK-47's, 25 RPG's, truck mounted 20-mm AA machine gun and recoless rifle that is hidden under the floor boards in the baby's room that you find in your not-so-typical Afghan hut.
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Simple shooters were either shot or imprisoned locally.
To persist in your dream world you have to explain why only A FEW were sent half way around the world.
Talk to someone who has served in country. If you can refrain from insulting them long enough to actually listen to what they tell you.
These were not shop keepers. Get over yourself.
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Not at all.
The idea that POWs should get civil trials frosts me. This is not a law enforcement issue.
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"round up the usual suspects"`
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Talk to someone who has served in country. If you can refrain from insulting them long enough to actually listen to what they tell you.
Straw man much?
"If you don't agree with me you hate American soldiers!"
Some of our soldiers are idiots, yes. Some are not. This shouldn't be suprising, since American soldiers are well American, and some Americans are idiots, and some are not. This isn't suprising because Americans are just humans, and some humans are idiots and some are not. Just because you enlist in t
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Re:These ARE FUCKING TERRORISTS what don't you get (Score:5, Informative)
Simple shooters were either shot or imprisoned locally.
To persist in your dream world you have to explain why only A FEW were sent half way around the world.
Talk to someone who has served in country. If you can refrain from insulting them long enough to actually listen to what they tell you.
These were not shop keepers. Get over yourself.
Served in country, lead ground patrols, cleared buildings, and called in aerial strikes in and around Fallujah as part of the 1st MEF portion of Operation Vigilant Resolve. Our platoon commander filed numerous reports and we have combat video documentation of almost all combatants that we captured. I doubt anyone that we captured was sent to Gitmo. Most were scrawny, under trained kids defending what they thought of as their home.
It's pretty fucking simple. Either you have evidence to prosecute those in Gitmo or you do not. I believe in our Constitution, have fought and bleed to protect it. It says all men are created equal, not all men except those we call terrorists. If we can't produce a report, a video, a witness, a letter, or anything that shows those men in Gitmo are terrorists, then why the fuck are we still holding them? Just because they hate us? I missed the part of the Constitution that lays out the principle of jailing people just because they hate you. And I'm pretty sure that actions such as those we are taking in Gitmo are some of the very same actions (Re: British imprisonment of dissenters) that led to our founding fathers forming a more perfect union.
We have become that which our founding fathers despised.
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No, they were turned in by people who claimed they had weapons or who claimed that they were terrorists. If you started handing out cash in South Central L.A. for "known criminals," and you had no way to check their record, what do you think is going to happen?
Tribes turn in other tribes, just as in the slave trade days. It's one of the reasons a nation cannot dominate that region of the mideast - because they are not nationalists. Tribe and religion will always trump whatever flag is planted in the capital
Non sequiter (Score:4, Informative)
Nice non sequiter there. Of the "70% to 90%" who were picked up, almost all of them were cleared and released immediately. Those detentions have nothing at all to do with Gitmo.
The article you are replying to said: "...were sent home from Guantanamo in March 2004, 15 months after their capture, with letters saying they posed 'no threat' to American forces." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html?ei=5088&en=4579c146cb14cfd6&ex=1274241600&pagewanted=all [nytimes.com] "
Did you not actually read the article you're responding to????
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you mean, like you are? (Score:4, Insightful)
These ARE FUCKING TERRORISTS what don't you get?
These people have not been convicted of anything; many of them were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Would you want them driving your taxi cab? Flipping your burgers? Digging up your main sewer line?
Why wouldn't I?
You fucking bleading heart liberal socialists need a quick lesson in The World in the 21st Century. It is US against them.
"F*cking fascists" (to use your own words) like you need a quick lesson of The World in the 20th Century, because attitudes like yours brought us two world wars and genocide.
On the other hand, Islamic terrorism is insignificant; for all its fireworks, 9/11 simply wasn't a significant contributor to mortality in the US even in 2001. People (like you) who try to create irrational fear because of 9/11 are helping the terrorists, both by destroying our liberties and by ascribing more power to terrorists than they actually have.
The US will not win the war on terrorism by force or jailing people. The only way we can win is through justice and compassion.
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and by rectifying or making amends for past injustices. like our overthrow of Iran's government in the 50s to help out our imperial buddies in the UK. or our current imbroglios. i think a strong dose of non-intervention is in order for the next 50 years. even in cases where the driving public sentiment is to help people, our hands are too dirty and our reputation too stained by
Re:These are not terrorists (Score:2)
Check out, say,
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2005/04/10/china-religious-repression-uighur-muslims [hrw.org]
or http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4435135.stm [bbc.co.uk]
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they can't be released to China, because the Chinese government considers dissidents terrorists
It surprises me that the US can't do a deal with the Chinese for these people. David Hicks was released to the Australians, jailed for a year then released with a control order. The Chinese can do deals too.
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The girls I see when I surf porn don't look like virgins, at all
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So now we've got people who are angry at us. Boo-fucking-hoo. Someone's going to have to man up and take responsibility for the problem. Or you can continue to be a pansy-ass and keep innocent people in prison because you're a fucking coward.
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or let them go.
And in what country do you propose to deposit them?
The United States of America, of course.
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