"A Uighur terrorist from a videotape released by the Turkistan Islamic Party last year." --Long War Journal
The
New York Times
reports that right now, for some odd reason, the Germans don't want to accept Uighur detainees who were
trained by the leader of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Party:
German interior officials said that the inmates from the Guantánamo Bay detention center whom the United States wants Germany to accept could pose a major security risk because they had spent time in terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. The United States has asked Germany to take 12 Chinese Uighurs, members of a Muslim minority located mostly in western China. The Uighurs have been persecuted by the Chinese authorities, according to human rights organizations, and American officials say they cannot be returned to China because they might be mistreated. But Uwe Schünemann, the conservative interior minister of the state of Lower Saxony, who along with the other 15 regional interior ministers must respond to the U.S. request, said that accepting the detainees was "not without danger." "The information we have is that the Uighurs we are being asked to accept were in terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and then they were sent to Guantánamo Bay," Mr. Schünemann said. "We need much more information from the U.S. about these detainees before we are prepared to make any decision." ... "What we want to know, besides much more information about their past, is why the former inmates will not settle in the U.S. and why they cannot return home," said Mr. Schünemann. Until then, he said, Germany will not be prepared to accept any former detainees.
In other Gitmo news, The Hill reports that "The White House sent a deputy national security adviser to Capitol Hill Wednesday evening to urge Senate Democrats to drop their resistance to relocating Guantanamo Bay detainees to U.S. prisons."