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Put cleared detainees in a hotel,
lawyer says
Fears of repression keep them on base
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | July 26, 2005
WASHINGTON -- In small bunkhouses surrounded by green
fences at Guantanamo Bay, 16 Chinese and Uzbek Muslim
men are approaching their fourth anniversary as
prisoners of America. They live like convicted
criminals: confined to small spaces far from their
families and watched by guards.
But these 16 men are different from the other 510
prisoners at Guantanamo. Months ago, a military
tribunal looked at the evidence and decided that they
were not ''enemy combatants." They had just been in
the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet despite
clearing them of terrorist suspicions, the US
government continues to keep them locked up in its
prison.
The prisoners are stuck in limbo because the United
States fears the governments of China and Uzbekistan,
which have a history of repressing Muslims, would kill
them if they were sent home, but no other country
wants them.
Now, a Boston-based lawyer who is representing two of
the Chinese Uighurs, as their ethnic group is called,
has come up with a startling proposal: move them out
of the prison and into a hotel.
In court papers declassified Friday, Attorney Sabin
Willett asked a federal judge to force the military to
let his clients live among civilians and off-duty
soldiers on the vast military base, where they could
move about freely in unrestricted areas and have
access to such luxuries as a shopping center, a movie
theater, and a McDonald's.
''Just because there is not yet a country to which the
petitioners may be sent does not mean that the only
option is to incarcerate them indefinitely," Willett
wrote. ''They were brought to Cuba by the United
States government against their will. There is vastly
more to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station than a prison,
and even if petitioners' stay must be prolonged for
some period of time, there is no reason to prolong
their imprisonment there."
So far, the Pentagon has not shown any sign that it
would be willing to allow the detainees to live on the
base. In addition to the 15 Uighurs and one Uzbek who
were cleared of being enemy combatants, there are two
more stranded Uzbeks who were deemed eligible for
release because they no longer pose a threat.
Army Major Jeff Weir, a spokesman for the prison, said
in a phone interview that ''safety and security"
concerns would prevent moving the detainees out of the
secure zone and into the regular part of the base,
where about 8,000 soldiers, sailors, and civilians
live, many with their families.
''They have been detained in here with some very bad
people, under some very bad influences," Weir said. ''We
can't just release them into a hotel amongst the
civilians on the base. . . . We understand the point
of what the lawyers are saying, but it's an
impossibility.
A Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant Commander Alvin
Plexico, said the government would respond to the
request in court. He also noted that the military has
tried to separate the stranded detainees from the rest
of the inmate population, housing them in communal
bunkhouses with ''shared living and dining areas and
unlimited recreation time."
But Willett, the lawyer for two of the Uighurs, said
it's still jail. And, he told the court, ''the
government itself . . . has acknowledged that there is
no lawful basis to imprison" his clients: Abu Bakker
Qassim, 36, and A'del Abdu Al-Hakim, 31.
Both men, he said, have wives and children back in
their Uighur homeland in China. Both told him they
left their homes, fleeing Communist oppression, before
the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and met at a market in
Kyrgystan.
They eventually moved on, hoping to find a way to
Turkey, where they planned to start a new life and
send for their families. But they were arrested by
Pakistani police in late 2001 and turned over to the
United States as suspected Al Qaeda members,
apparently in return for $5,000 bounties, he said. The
United States brought them to Guantanamo in mid-2002.
Weir, the prison spokesman, argued that even though
the detainees were found by the military tribunal not
to have been part of Al Qaeda, they could be dangerous
for other reasons. Tribunal transcripts show that some
Uighurs received weapons training in Afghanistan to
fight the Chinese government, though they testified
that they bore no ill will toward the United States.
Willett, who visited his clients this month, said he
saw nothing ''that would indicate the remotest
interest in terrorism." America has locked them up
without justification for more than three years, he
said, and putting them up at a hotel now that the
country knows it made a mistake is the least it could
do.
Willett, a bankruptcy specialist, is among dozens of
lawyers who have taken on Guantanamo detainees at
their own expense since June 2004, when the Supreme
Court ruled that the prisoners were entitled to
challenge their designation as enemy combatants.
Those lawsuits are all frozen while an appeals court
decides whether the military's tribunals -- in which
detainees had no legal representation and were not
shown all the evidence against them -- were sufficient
to satisfy the Supreme Court's ruling.
But last week, Willett asked a judge to rule
immediately on moving his clients into a hotel.
Ultimately, Willett said, if no other country will
take them in, the United States should grant them
asylum as refugees from religious persecution, though
he has not made a formal request.
''Everybody can understand how a mistake might be made
in the fog of war to begin with," he said. ''It'd be a
great thing if the executive could reach out and show
the good grace to try to correct such a mistake. I'm
hopeful that might happen."
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/
2005/07/26/put_cleared_detainees_in_a_hotel_lawyer_says/
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