Inside the Belly of the Beltway Beast

Abu Bakker Qassim's letter to Barack Obama Dear Mr. President, I express my gratitude and my best respect for the contribution of the United States of America to our Uighur community. At the same time, I express my gratitude for your right and prompt decision to close the jail of Guantánamo Bay. I hope you will forgive my English, which I have tried to learn. I hope my letter will find you in a good health. Please allow me to express my wish and prayer to read my letter. My name is Abu Bakker and I'm writing on behalf of Ahmet, Aktar, Ejup, with whom I have lived since May 2006 in Albania, the only country that offered us political asylum from Guantánamo when US courts concluded that we were not enemy combatants. I would like to write something about myself. The Uighur people have a proverb: "Who thinks about the end will never be a hero." Obviously it is human to think about the end, as it is human for me to remember things long ago. 30.12.2000. My last night in my l...

This further confirms what many of us activists long believed about the modus operandi of the Bush regime. Of course many of us (including myself and 52 others in Maryland) were tracked and labeled terrorists by the Maryland State Police. And a subset of that group was further spied on by the Department of Homeland (Fatherland) Security. Here it is, Bruce Fein explains what happened to the U.S. Constitution following September 11, 2001. FEIN: End presidential secrecy Bruce Fein Congress should swiftly enact a statute prohibiting secret presidential government. The urgency was demonstrated last week when nine ill-conceived legal memoranda to justify despotism cobbled together by the pliable Jay Bybee and John Yoo in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush were belatedly released. Their shelf-life would have been nanoseconds if they had been immediately exposed. Their counterconstitutional reasoning would have been instantly discredited. Instead, the memoranda remained inta...

Today in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, 17 uighur men detained and imprisoned for seven years, first in Afghanistan and then in Guantanamo Bay were ordered to be freed and released to the U.S. Judge Ricardo Urbina rejected the government's argument that the men, all of whom were declared non-enemy combatants four years ago should remain detained against their wills in a state of legal limbo. Judge Urbina ordered the immediate release of all the men, and scheduled a hearing for Friday at 10 a.m. to discuss the details of the men's acclimation to living inside the U.S. Uighurs are an Islamic ethnic group residing in western China. Many want to separate from the Chinese regime and form their own homeland. For this reason, China does not want their return, nor do many of them wish to return due to the likelihood that they would be imprisoned and tortured for their beliefs. A small uighur community will house the men for a temporary period in the Washington Metro ...