June 11, 2009--Little Palau
I was sitting in Balthazar the other morning, minding my own business, just starting my second cup of coffee, when one of the regulars, all agitated, ran over to my table.
“Did you hear,” he said, betraying more than early morning anxiety, “that they’re bringing one of the worst terrorists to Manhattan?”
Without making eye contact, feeling who needed aggravation before even turning to the front page of the New York Times, I muttered something like, “Huh?”
“Yeah, walking distance from here. Downtown. From Guantánamo.”
“Huh?”
“It’s in the paper. Look.” He thrust his copy of the Times between my face and coffee cup. “Read it for yourself.”
I glanced at the headline. Sure enough, the Obama administration decided to bring a detainee here for a federal trial. Annoyed that he had interrupted my wake-up routine, I said, “So what’s the big deal? Who cares? What’s going to happen that has you so upset?”
“He was involved in blowing up the World Trade Center.”
“I understand. He’s an evil person. But what has you so worried?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’ll come to help him escape. Or blow up some more buildings in New York now that he’s here.”
“Don’t we already have that blind sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman I think his name was, who blew up the Trade Center in 1993? He’s in prison downtown. Or at least he was. And nothing happened.”
“Well, how would you feel if this new guy, Ahmed Ghailani, broke out of jail and was loose on the streets of New York?”
To that I had no answer, except to say, “When has anyone ever broken out of a prison here in New York? Hey, this is the Big Apple. We know how to do things.” And with that I waved him away and got back to concentrating on my coffee. It had cooled just enough to take a long sip.
And then when I did turn to the paper I also read about 17 more detainees from Guantánamo who we’ve been holding in GITMO for years, who are set, it seems, to be transferred to Palau. “Where?” I said to myself. I was still not fully awake. A tiny island nation in the middle of the Pacific I read.
I thought, Isn’t it great that this chain of more than 258 atolls that you can barely find on the map, with a population of barely 20,000 is willing to take 17 of these prisoners while my Balthazar friend is freaking out about having just one in New York City. And, how many was it, 90 senators, Democrats as well as Republicans voted last month not to provide the funds to close Guantánamo, saying, after blustering about human rights violations and hearing that even General Petraeus wants GITMO closed, “Not in my backyard.”
Of course the story is a little more complicated. But really not that much. These 17 are Chinese Muslims, Uighurs, who even the Bush administration did not classify as enemy combatants and were ordered back in the fall by a federal district court (thankfully not the one Sonia Sotomayor sits on) to be released in the United States.
So since that time the U.S. has been looking for places that would agree to take some of them because we, of course, do not want them walking around on the streets in America. We have contacted more than 100 governments to see if they might be willing—including countries who were part of the Coalition of the Willing that joined us in the invasion of Iraq—and thus far have come up empty. We even tried to get China to take them back since they are Chinese, but they turned us down because they do not want any more Chinese Muslims within their borders for fear that they would get engaged in the Islamic separatist movement there.
Running out of options, the president of Palau, Johnson Toribiong, stepped up and said, “Palau would be honored and proud to take them in as a humanitarian gesture.” (See linked New York Times article for the details.)
We’re still waiting to hear from our other allies—Gordon Brown or Nicolas Sarkozy, for example, though England and France, after much arm-twisting by their new best friend, Barack Obama, did agree to take one detainee each.
OK, so we’re giving Palau $200 million in “long-term development aid.” After all, they can’t get by on just what they earn from scuba diving junkets or as the setting for the reality show Survivor, which twice before used this Pacific paradise as the location for their antics.
Maybe Pago Pago will now take a few. And even Bikini Atoll where we tested H bombs back in the 40s and 50s. It’s radiation free these days and also could also use some development aid. As you might imagine, their tourism business is still not happening.
“Did you hear,” he said, betraying more than early morning anxiety, “that they’re bringing one of the worst terrorists to Manhattan?”
Without making eye contact, feeling who needed aggravation before even turning to the front page of the New York Times, I muttered something like, “Huh?”
“Yeah, walking distance from here. Downtown. From Guantánamo.”
“Huh?”
“It’s in the paper. Look.” He thrust his copy of the Times between my face and coffee cup. “Read it for yourself.”
I glanced at the headline. Sure enough, the Obama administration decided to bring a detainee here for a federal trial. Annoyed that he had interrupted my wake-up routine, I said, “So what’s the big deal? Who cares? What’s going to happen that has you so upset?”
“He was involved in blowing up the World Trade Center.”
“I understand. He’s an evil person. But what has you so worried?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’ll come to help him escape. Or blow up some more buildings in New York now that he’s here.”
“Don’t we already have that blind sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman I think his name was, who blew up the Trade Center in 1993? He’s in prison downtown. Or at least he was. And nothing happened.”
“Well, how would you feel if this new guy, Ahmed Ghailani, broke out of jail and was loose on the streets of New York?”
To that I had no answer, except to say, “When has anyone ever broken out of a prison here in New York? Hey, this is the Big Apple. We know how to do things.” And with that I waved him away and got back to concentrating on my coffee. It had cooled just enough to take a long sip.
And then when I did turn to the paper I also read about 17 more detainees from Guantánamo who we’ve been holding in GITMO for years, who are set, it seems, to be transferred to Palau. “Where?” I said to myself. I was still not fully awake. A tiny island nation in the middle of the Pacific I read.
I thought, Isn’t it great that this chain of more than 258 atolls that you can barely find on the map, with a population of barely 20,000 is willing to take 17 of these prisoners while my Balthazar friend is freaking out about having just one in New York City. And, how many was it, 90 senators, Democrats as well as Republicans voted last month not to provide the funds to close Guantánamo, saying, after blustering about human rights violations and hearing that even General Petraeus wants GITMO closed, “Not in my backyard.”
Of course the story is a little more complicated. But really not that much. These 17 are Chinese Muslims, Uighurs, who even the Bush administration did not classify as enemy combatants and were ordered back in the fall by a federal district court (thankfully not the one Sonia Sotomayor sits on) to be released in the United States.
So since that time the U.S. has been looking for places that would agree to take some of them because we, of course, do not want them walking around on the streets in America. We have contacted more than 100 governments to see if they might be willing—including countries who were part of the Coalition of the Willing that joined us in the invasion of Iraq—and thus far have come up empty. We even tried to get China to take them back since they are Chinese, but they turned us down because they do not want any more Chinese Muslims within their borders for fear that they would get engaged in the Islamic separatist movement there.
Running out of options, the president of Palau, Johnson Toribiong, stepped up and said, “Palau would be honored and proud to take them in as a humanitarian gesture.” (See linked New York Times article for the details.)
We’re still waiting to hear from our other allies—Gordon Brown or Nicolas Sarkozy, for example, though England and France, after much arm-twisting by their new best friend, Barack Obama, did agree to take one detainee each.
OK, so we’re giving Palau $200 million in “long-term development aid.” After all, they can’t get by on just what they earn from scuba diving junkets or as the setting for the reality show Survivor, which twice before used this Pacific paradise as the location for their antics.
Maybe Pago Pago will now take a few. And even Bikini Atoll where we tested H bombs back in the 40s and 50s. It’s radiation free these days and also could also use some development aid. As you might imagine, their tourism business is still not happening.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
5:21 AM
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