It just keeps getting worse.
If, after the horror stories from Haditha and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, you want fresh evidence that the war against terrorism has become a war against all of the values and principles we have traditionally upheld in this country, consider the plight of five Chinese men now stranded in Tirana, the capital of Albania.
You can bet that President Bush did not see one of them during his brief visit to Albania, where he is practically worshipped -- largely because of what Clinton did to keep the Serbs from obliterating the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo. (Albanians also like Bush for urging the independence of Kosovo, though it's not at all clear he's done anything more than talk about it.)
Anyway, the five Chinamen now stranded in Tirana are members of another persecuted minority: the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs) of China's far-western Xinjaing Province, which they call East Turkestan. The Uighurs -- roughly nine million people -- live under the heel of oppression. According to the U.S. State Department report on human rights in China for 2006, they suffer discrimination, suppression of Muslim religious freedom, and persecution for "separatist" acts, with execution for many would-be separatists.
Six years ago, the five Uighurs now in Tirana left their native land and their families in search of freedom from persecution and higher earnings. After traveling through Central Asia, they found their way to Afghanistan, where they settled down with about three dozen other Uighur men in a hamlet near Tora Bora because they were told it would offer them free food and shelter while they planned their next move.
At this primitive training camp for Uighur liberation, which is how the Uighurs in Tirana now describe the hamlet, they were shown no more than how to fire an old AK-47 assault rifle. But since the Pentagon decided the hamlet was somehow linked to the Taliban, U.S. forces bombed it in mid-October 2001, driving the men into Pakistan, where they were first sheltered and fed and then delivered to our forces.
By June 2002 the five were in Guantanamo, where they were interrogated by Chinese security officials who had access to all of their files, threatened them repeatedly, and insisted they return to China. They refused, and after another two years, Guantanamo officials finally concluded that they were not really terrorists and decided to free them. But where do you send a man whom you have branded -- even temporarily -- as a terrorist or enemy combatant?
They couldn't enter the United States because the Immigration and Nationality Act bars anyone who has been linked to a terrorist group or has received "military-type training" from a group engaged in terrorism. No exceptions are made for those acquitted of terrorism because the brand is ineradicable. Ironically, the only country in the world that wanted them was the one place that didn't want to go: China. According to a statement issued by the Chinese Embassy in Washington, China wanted to put them on trial as "suspects of the East Turkestan terrorist forces which constitute part of international terrorist forces."
That statement shows just how "terrorism" can be used to stigmatize anyone who challenges a government, or anyone linked to a group that challenges a government, whether or not he has ever fired a weapon at anyone else. In fact, our scattershot definition of terrorism now includes any armed resistance to a government, no matter how oppressive. Retroactively, then, even George Washington would qualify as a terrorist, along with such erstwhile "freedom fighters" as the Salvadoran contras beloved of Oliver North and Ronald Reagan.
There is no such thing as a freedom fighter now. Having waged for more than four years a flagrantly unjustified war, we have forfeited the right to distinguish between terrorism and just resistance to an unjust government, or to criticize China for trashing human rights in the name of fighting terrorism.
To be fair, our State Department worked hard to find a safe place for the five Uighurs and paid the Albanian government generously for taking them in. But American officials have now washed their hands of the Uighur five and will do nothing to relieve their desperation. After four years at Guantanamo, they are virtual prisoners in a squalid refugee center on the outskirts of Tirana, unable to move out until they can learn the Albanian language and get work permits. Though they can occasionally speak to their families in brief phone calls, they are losing hope of ever seeing their wives and children again.
When we launched our indiscriminate war on terrorism, which has killed and maimed and incarcerated and tortured countless numbers of innocent men and women, we seem to have forgotten that the political concept of Terror originated as an instrument of order. On September 5, 1793, almost exactly two hundred and eight years before 9/11, the Committee of Public Safety in the newborn Republic of France declared that Terror was the order of the day -- by which it meant that the government would drive the terrifying blade of the guillotine through the neck of anyone it considered a "traitor." Of course we don't use the guillotine now on those we call "enemy combatants" or "terrorists." But many of whom we have branded by these terms would probably choose the guillotine over the lives of inexorably darkening desperation to which we have doomed them.
One of our victims, however, may yet see the light. On this very day, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia, ruled that the only person of the American continent known to be held an enemy combatant can no longer be detained on that basis. "To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians," wrote Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, "even if the President calls them 'enemy combatants,' would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution -- and the country."
Thank you, your honor. Maybe, just maybe, we're beginning to crawl out of the pit.