These guys were not just standing on a street corner in Afghanistan when our military scooped them up just for looking like a terrorist, they were captured on a battlefield armed and trying to kill the people that are trying to protect us.
Do you have any evidence to back up that statement? Because the article that
you cited states just the opposite. To quote again from your article:
All of the Uighurs were captured in Pakistan and Afghanistan as suspected allies of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
. . .
U.S. officials eventually declared the Uighurs innocent of any wrongdoing and authorized their release . . .
What part of "declared them innocent of any wrongdoing" supports your argument that they "were not just standing on a street corner in Afghanistan when our military scooped them up just for looking like a terrorist . . ."?
These men were found to be innocent of terrorism against America and were approved for release by the military as early as 2003, but they are only just now being released! For an informative background on these particular individuals, here is a good article from the Washington Post (from 2005!):
Chinese Detainees Are Men Without a Country
From the first paragraph of that article:
In late 2003, the Pentagon quietly decided that 15 Chinese Muslims detained at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could be released. Five were people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, some of them picked up by Pakistani bounty hunters for U.S. payoffs. The other 10 were deemed low-risk detainees whose enemy was China's communist government -- not the United States, according to senior U.S. officials.
More than 20 months later, the 15 still languish at Guantanamo Bay, imprisoned and sometimes shackled, with most of their families unaware whether they are even alive.
When these terrorists were interviewed at their USA taxpayer funded home they said that they would like to learn to: Drive, Scuba Dive, and Bowl. No mention of a job, where is that money coming from?
Again, they were found by our military tribunals to actually
NOT be terrorists. So the fundamental argument by which you want us to hate them is unfounded. These men were innocent victims, not terrorists. If you want to continue to use that argument, then please provide some authority for it, other than the vague: "well we captured them on the battlefield trying to kill our soldiers." Because both the article you cited and the article I cited state otherwise.
Please let your anger go for a moment and consider if these men were indeed innocent bystanders, as the military tribunals found them to be. Then we have imprisoned them and probably tortured them and then continued to imprison them for no reason for six years AFTER we determined that they were innocent! Do you not see anything wrong with that picture?
My position on our “reputation in the international community” is that these Islamist extremists will never be at peace with freedom and liberty. Nor will they ever like us so they better fear us; it is the only thing they understand.
You act as if the islamic extremists are the only ones that matter. They are not the only ones watching what we do and how we do it. Your focus is a little too narrow. The implications of our actions go far beyond the simple problem of islamic extremism. The world is a large place and there are a lot of powerful players out there that we must take into account when we act.
I rarely “throw crap” nor do I seek to inflame with ridiculous statements.
You mean like in the Sotomayer thread, where you posted a highly partisan, rhetorical and fairly inaccurate "memorandum to JCN members" and then never took part in the discussion that ensued? I call the kind of post you made in that thread throwing crap at the wall to see what sticks and just seeking to inflame without honestly engaging in discussion. Just my opinion, of course.
