Even Gitmo affects U.S.-China ties

Whether to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention camp was very much a policy debate in the United States. The Bush administration moved prisoners captured in Afghanistan into Guantanamo and asserted that these detainees, who were classified as “enemy combatants,” were not entitled to any of the protections offered by the Geneva Conventions.

After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Americans commandeered Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, where they kept suspected terrorists. By early 2004, accounts surfaced of physical, psychological and sexual abuse of prisoners. Photographs were released showing naked inmates stacked onto a pile; others showed inmates being threatened by guards dogs.

Both Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo became synonymous with the torture and abuse of prisoners, leading to the decline of America's moral authority. Abu Ghraib was closed in 2006.

To restore America's international image, many demanded the closing of Guantanamo's detention facilities. Both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates called for this.

Under President Obama's executive order, the Guantanamo facilities have to close by January 22, 2010.

This means that the 245 or so inmates there have to be released or moved. The United States itself is unwilling to take any of them, even ones that it considers to no longer be a threat. Instead, it has been calling on other countries to take them.

Among the inmates were 17 Chinese nationals, Muslims from a Turkic ethnic group known as Uighurs, who live in Xinjiang, in western China.

The 17 Uighurs were among 22 captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001 and taken to Guantanamo. After years of confinement, the U.S. government determined the Uighurs were not “enemy combatants” and cleared them for release.

However, the United States would not take them and rejected the option of sending them back to China for fear that they may be subject to persecution. So Washington had to ask other countries to take them.

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