Terrorwashing a Genocide

IN 2002, THE United States sent 22 Uyghur men to Guantanamo Bay, where they joined more than 700 other detainees living beyond the comforts of the Geneva Convention. The men were Chinese citizens who U.S. intelligence believed had received weapons training in Afghanistan, and the U.S. military had advertised $5,000 a head for their capture on leaflets circulated among bounty hunters in Pakistan. After their camp in Afghanistan was bombed in the early days of the American invasion, 18 of the men spent months hiding in the caves of Tora Bora, hoping to return to China. When they finally made it across the border to Pakistan, their mountain guides lured them to a mosque, where they were turned over to U.S. forces and flown to Gitmo.

Years passed. After a series of tribunals in the mid-2000s, the military concluded that none of the detained men was an enemy combatant. None could be charged with a crime under U.S. law. Until their detention, none had even heard of Al Qaeda, the great enemy of America with whom their obscure militant group was meant to be closely allied. The prisoners “only have one enemy, and that’s the Chinese,” one of the detainees told a tribunal in 2004. “They have been torturing us and killing us all: old, young, men, women, little children, and unborn children.”

Something had clearly gone amiss. Yet the prospect of bringing the detainees into the U.S. was unthinkable to military and political leaders, even after a federal district court judge ordered some of the men released. Nor could they be shipped to China, to be forcibly disappeared inside an opaque prison system where political dissidents are routinely executed. (Although the exact figure is a state secret, China kills thousands of prisoners every year, several times the