shame.jpgThis is who we are at the moment:

The men, Muslims from western China’s Uighur ethnic minority, were freed from their confinement in Cuba after they were found to pose no threat to the United States. They have now lived for more than a year in a squalid government refugee center on the grubby outskirts of Tirana, guarded by armed policemen.The men have been told that they will need to get work to move out of the center, they said, but that they must learn the Albanian language to get work permits. For now, they subsist on free meals heavy with macaroni and rice, and monthly stipends of about $67, which they spend mostly on brief telephone calls to their families. But some of the men have already lost hope of ever seeing their wives and children again.

“We suffered very much at Guantánamo, but we continue to suffer here,” Mr. Basit said. “The other prisoners had their countries, but we are like orphans: we have no place to go.”

Mr. Basit and four other men here, who spent time at a hamlet in Afghanistan run by Uighur separatists, are still considered terrorist suspects by China’s Communist government. Only Albania’s pro-American government would give them asylum, but Albanian officials have since told the men they cannot afford to give them much else.

Things could be worse, the former prisoners note. At least 15 of the 17 Uighurs who remain at Guantánamo have also been cleared for release, but not even Albania will accept them — and neither will the United States. Instead, American diplomats say they have asked nearly 100 countries to provide asylum to the detainees, only to find that Chinese officials have warned some of the same countries not to accept them.

“The United States has made extensive and high-level efforts over a period of four years to try to resettle the Uighurs in countries around the world,” the State Department’s legal adviser, John B. Bellinger III, said in an interview. Its lack of success, he added, “has not been for lack of trying.”

Many American officials privately describe the Uighurs’ plight as one of the more troubling episodes of the Bush administration’s detention program. The case also provides a view of the remarkable difficulties Washington has encountered in trying to winnow the detainee population at Guantánamo in response to domestic and international criticism.  (emphasis mine)

Digby has a revealing glimpse of how this came to be:

That prison is right out of dystopian science fiction. It is not as if the United States government doesn’t have access to the mountains of information that shows these techniques are incredibly unreliable and counterproductive. It’s not as if they don’t know that there are much better ways of extracting information. It’s not as if over the course of centuries we developed a set of moral guidelines that define what it means to be a decent society. They know all these things. They just chose to use television shows and movies as their guideline instead of real information, real morality or the rule of law.And then, there is the assault on reason itself:

The details of prison life were given by retired and current American intelligence agents who had been promised confidentiality, the report says.Their motives were varied, Mr. Marty said. “For 15 years, I have interviewed people as an investigating magistrate and I have always noticed that at a certain point, people with secrets need to talk,” he said.

Others justified the grim treatment, the reports said, saying, in one instance: “Here’s my question. Was the guy a terrorist? ’Cause if he’s a terrorist, then I figure he got what was coming to him.”

Well, that is an excellent question, isn’t it — the very reason due process was conceived in the first place. It is, of course, unacceptable to torture anyone, even if they are terrorists. But this argument is especially specious coming from a country that picked up a bunch of innocent people and then tortured them and confined them indefinitely. (Not to mention started a war based on false evidence.) Let’s just say they aren’t the greatest at unilaterally discerning who’s guilty and who’s not. Which, again, is the fucking reason for due process in the first place.So, they adopted a torture first, ask questions later approach based upon … what? Season 1 of “24″?  (emphasis mine)

In case you were wondering, the answer to that may be “yes.” Just go look at the photo that Digby posted. But someone tell BobbyG to take his blood pressure meds first…he’ll need them.

Note that the US cannot find asylum for these innocent people because the Chinese government told these nations not to take them.  George Bush has put the United States in such a weakened posture that the Chinese government is now dictating terms to other nations on whether or not they can do the decent thing and accept innocent people who we have been wrongly detaining — for years — because the Chinese government doesn’t want these people to receive mercy.  A lot of these nations have been enjoying Chinese loans (just like the US has been to finance a lot of George Bush’s follies), and they cannot afford to anger the Chinese and their substantially strengthened posture.  Welcome to the world that George Bush built for all of us.  Feeling safer now?

(Photo via maureenml0521.)

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