Here’s the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus on the case of Huzaifa Parhat, the Chinese Uighur Muslim who has spent the last six years in Gitmo. A federal court recently ruled that the Bush administration’s evidence against Parhat was minimal:

Sen. McCain, you called the Supreme Court’s recent Guantanamo ruling, which gives Parhat and other detainees the chance to make their case directly to a federal judge, “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.” As someone who spent so long in captivity, could you tell Parhat why it would have been so terrible to let a court hear his case — years ago?

Mr. Chief Justice, in that decision, you termed the rules under which Parhat was held “the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants.” True enough. Please explain to Parhat how those protections were adequate.

And Mr. President, Parhat once imagined that America would help the Uighurs, a group your own State Department says has been subjected to “official repression” by the Chinese government. Could you tell him that America has treated him fairly?
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If not — and it’s hard to see how you could — please find a way, before you leave office, to let him go.

Problem is, China won’t take him back. Many of the Uighurs we detained in the months after September 11 are in a kind of legal no-man’s land.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 10:43 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Innocence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.