America, meet your new neighbors: the Uighurs

President Barack Obama has heeded his generals and decided not to release more photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, and good for him. Now, he needs to put our national security ahead of politics once again and reverse his dangerous decision to release trained terrorists currently held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, into American suburbs.

America, meet the Uighurs.

Seventeen of the 241 terrorist detainees currently being held at Guantanamo Bay are Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs. They have been allied with and trained by al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist groups. The goal of the Uighurs is to establish a separate sharia state. 

As part of its ongoing effort to close Guantanamo Bay, the Obama administration has had to figure out what to do with the Uighurs. Officials believe that if they’re sent back to China they will be persecuted, and no third country will take them.

So the Obama administration has decided to set the Uighurs loose in America.

But the Obama administration’s plan for the Uighurs doesn’t stop there. At Guantanamo Bay, the Uighurs are known for picking up television sets on which women with bare arms appear and hurling them across the room.

Perhaps understandably, the Obama administration believes the Uighurs will need help adjusting to American society, in which women with bare arms have been known to appear.

So last month, Obama administration Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair indicated that terrorist detainees released into the United States would receive public assistance.

By their own admission, Uighurs being held at Guantanamo Bay are members of or associated with the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), an al-Qaida-affiliated group designated as a terrorist organization under U.S. law. The goal of ETIM is to establish a radical Islamist state in Asia.

Prior to 9/11, the Uighurs received jihadist training in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, a known al-Qaida and Taliban training ground. What’s more, they were trained, most likely in the weapons, explosives and ideology of mass killing, by Abdul Haq, a member of al-Qaida’s shura, or top advisory council. Obama’s own interagency review board found that at least some of the Uighurs are dangerous.

Notwithstanding the paramount threat posed by the Uighurs, defending them and other terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay has become trendy among left-wing civil liberties groups and private-practice lawyers looking for fashionable pro bono work.

As a matter of fact, Attorney General Eric Holder’s law firm, Covington and Burlington, represents 17 Yemenis and one Pakistani currently being held at Guantanamo. In all, about a dozen Obama Justice Department lawyers are from private firms that represent detainees.

As former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy writes, “Has it dawned on people yet that it’s a huge problem to have a Justice Department stocked with lawyers who have spent [or whose firms have spent] the last eight years volunteering their services to America’s enemies?”

As you would expect, this army of left-wing activists and high-priced lawyers has led a public-relations offensive on behalf of the Uighurs to convince nervous suburbanites that the former terrorist detainees will make great neighbors. They claim that the Uighurs are harmless Chinese separatists who have been unjustly detained. Their real problem is with the repressive Chinese government, they claim, not us. 

But as you can see, the truth about the Uighurs is very different. Contrary to the claims of their defenders, the Guantanamo Bay Uighurs are not pro-democracy activists unjustly held by American authorities.

They have no place in American communities.

So congratulations to Obama for defying his radical left-wing base and refusing to release the prisoner-abuse photos. Now he should do the same with the Uighurs.