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Sorry For the Detainment, Here's a Laptop
A select group of 17 Uighur Muslims held in Guantánamo, and waiting for a nation to grant them asylum are getting laptops and web training from the US military. Their web training will take place in a virtual computer lab the military has set up. The lessons will be limited to DVD language training as well as a basic users skill — set to help in any future employment options. Nury Turkel, an Uighur rights activist, said the training would help the men "be reintroduced into a modern society," adding that it "also would give hope to the men that their freedom is nearing." This special group already gets to order fast food and use a phone booth for weekly calls. I think the government is on to something here. Nothing keeps a man pacified like an occasional phone call, a cheeseburger, and surfing for a little porn.
For those not in the know, these prisoners are a tough case. The Chinese don't want them back (they're nasty separatist rebels to them), and they don't want to go back to China as it is for fear of waking up one morning with a bullet in their heads. They really don't belong in Gitmo -- they're not full-on Al Qaeda. Nobody in the US wants to grant them asylum because they're former gitmo detainees. The last thing the US wants is to release them to somebody like Yemen or Saudi Arabia, where they can become full-on Al Qaeda. A US judge said they have to be released, but didn't specify to which country. This whole thing is just a mess...
I welcome them to my neighborhood - there's 4 houses on my block that are empty now. Even if they only fill one, that's one less house being used for covert teenage sex and drug use or being decorated with spray paint as "turf". It puts a few people willing to work in my neighborhood, which is lacking a few, and could possibly even raise the value of my property in the long term as having an occupied house next door looks much better than having a burned out husk, because someone started a fire with a pipe or a cookstove. There's a few places nearby hiring ($8/hr, but it's a job), and in a few years, they could be chasing the American Dream at full speed. So again, yes, move them into my neighborhood. The house payment + utilities is almost certainly less than what debt we're racking up on them in GITMO.
Truck driver, plumber, Linux systems engineer.
775 prisoners have been delivered to Guantanamo. Of these, 420 have been released without charge already, and of those that remain only 60 to 80 actually have pending charges. The rest will be freed (once there's somewhere to put them). So, if anything, the accuracy of imprisoning people in Guantanamo is actually worse than general picking up of people in Iraq, not better.
Personally, I'm willing to have these people in my neighborhood. The biggest threat to my safety I perceive is from vigilantes bent on finding and killing them, not the prisoners themselves.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Not to start a hostile, brutal flame war, but I'm somewhat glad. Lets make a small observation: Fundamentalist Jews (who aren't running a country) are generally harmless, well kept people; Fundamentalist Muslims make headlines all of the time for murder. The Torah is just as violent as the Qu'ran, in fact they're closely related. So why are there so many more violent fundy Muslims than Jews/Christians? Take a quick look at their social situation: war-torn poor countries with next to no education. Any surprise the un-educated group tends to violence? We see the same pattern in African countries plagued by famine. These people need education, and that's what they're getting; maybe now they'll have a shot at living a normal life.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]