Gitmo Not Going Quietly

Recently I criticized Carter for blasting Bush on Gitmo. George is doing everything he can to make me eat my words. This is strangely analogous to the steroids scandal in baseball. Just as soon as the story was fading from the news, it's back and it's as if it's never left.

The US military has kept two ethnic Uighur Muslims from a troubled Chinese region at its Guantanamo 'war on terror' detention camp even though they have been found not to be "enemy combatants," a rights group said.

File this one under how not to run public relations for an administration. This seems to be a running theme actually.

According to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a New York-based legal activist group, a Guantanamo review panel ruled in March that Qassim and Hakim should not be considered "enemy combatants" who would face military tribunals.

But the CCR said the men's lawyers were never told about the finding. "It was not until Friday, July 30, 2005 that the government disclosed that the men had been cleared on March 26 this year," said a statement by the group which has been working on the case of the Uighurs.

Oh, but there is an excuse for this debacle. It's of the "dog ate my homework" variety.

"The United States has made it clear that it does not expel, return or extradite individuals to other countries where it believes that it is 'more likely than not' that they will be tortured or subject to persecution," said Lieutenant Commander Alvin Plexico, a Pentagon spokesman.

"This is US policy as well as US law," he said.

Oh I get it, we kept them in prison here to avoid sending them to China. While China's human rights record is notably abysmal, I'm not sure keeping the two fellows here is a good policy. In fact, I know it's not.

If we're going to start caring about human rights, we should do two things. First, clean up our human rights. I'm not talking about the "gulag" down in Cuba, I'm reffering to our abortion policy.

Before someone screams that I'm throwing this one in here for no reason, let me explain. One of the reasons that the Muslims don't like us is because of our culture. Getting rid of abortion would be a good move in the view of most Muslims. Since the left loves to play the apologist for the Arab world, we should be seeing the DNP moving to scrap Roe v. Wade in the near future. Uh huh.

The greater and more serious point is our relationship with China. Do we really want to try to get them to play ball on human rights? Slap an embargo on them and boycott the 2008 Olympics. It's not going to happen of course, because our corporations love to exploit cheap Chinese labor. This ties into what was mentioned earlier.

We are contributing to human rights abuses by allowing corporations to export jobs to countries where the people are not paid anything close to a living wage. There will of course be debates over what constitutes a living wage and how that should be implemented, but all but the most heartless would agree that paying a couple of hours for 12-14 hours a day in a sweat shop is deplorable.

Shame on our corporations for participating in human rights violations. Shame on Bush and Congress for not doing something serious about China. Shame on the military for further tarnishing our respect--what little we have left--in the world and lending credence to folks like Carter.

It's really disappointing to have to swallow my words over Gitmo. No, it's not a "gulag" that needs to be shut down, but these little problems keep adding up.

I should know better than to try to defend this administration.