Ilshat Hassan, a Uighur refugee from China, has offered to take one of the Guantánamo Uighurs into his McLean, Va., apartment.
WASHINGTON — Ilshat Hassan’s flight from China has brought refuge, a job at the consulting firm Booz Allen and an apartment in the Virginia suburbs.
Mr. Hassan, an intense former college professor, is among some 300 exiles from western China’s Uighur Muslim minority who live peacefully in the Washington area, where the American government has supported their pro-democracy efforts. But while the United States is hosting Mr. Hassan and the others, it has been imprisoning 17 of their countrymen in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
“Their story is my story,” said Mr. Hassan, an edge in his voice. He meant his account of escape in 2003 from a repressive Chinese government. Not the particulars, which, in the cases of the 17 Uighur detainees, have included seven years of isolation and despair.
The Uighurs have become something of a Guantánamo Rorschach test: hapless refugees to some, dangerous plotters to others. For the Obama administration, the task of determining which of those portraits is correct and whether the men can be released inside the United States has raised the stakes for the president’s plan to close the Guantánamo prison. Either choice is likely to provoke intense reaction.
The dilemma has taken on new urgency because the plan to close the prison depends on other countries’ accepting some of the remaining 241 detainees Diplomats say that with President Obama embarking on Tuesday on a European trip, the effort could falter unless this country signals it is willing to take some of the Guantánamo prisoners.
At home, though, Mr. Obama faces the prospect of a storm of protest from some quarters if he admits detainees the Bush administration labeled terrorists and barred from this country. Already, word of the men’s possible release has brought denunciations and anxiety from military groups, families of Sept. 11 victims and political figures.
“I don’t think people want people that could potentially be terrorists in the United States,” said Representative J. Randy Forbes, Republican of Virginia.
There were signs on Tuesday that the decision-making process was accelerating. Administration officials were in Guantánamo interviewing the 17 men to assess their suitability for release, perhaps in the United States, one official said.
But a detailed review of thousands of pages of documents suggests that definitive answers about who the 17 Uighurs really are will be hard to find. The public record, including intelligence and other materials from court cases and military hearings, often presents a hazy picture.
The men ended up in American hands in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001 and 2002, in some cases after the payment of bounties. Their life stories are inexact: hat maker, shoe repairman, typist in the Uighurs’ Turkic language. The evidence against them has been declared dubious by federal courts. But former Bush administration officials said in interviews that there had been no serious effort to clear up the mysteries.
Still, in the Uighur expatriate community here, Mr. Hassan and other refugees argue it is clear the men pose no danger. They have offered to take in the men should they be released. Freeing the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs) would be a singular moment in the debate over the Guantánamo prison: critics would see a final judgment that innocent men were locked away there.
The specific intentions of the Uighurs in Afghanistan in 2001 are hard to define. “There is nothing else there but to learn to fight the Chinese, and then go back again,” one of them told a military panel.
The Bush administration conceded last fall that none of the men were enemy combatants. Then the Justice Department argued that they should never be admitted into this country because they “sought to wage terror” in China.
Lawyers for the men called that accusation “imprisonment by defamation.” They focus on evidence that 13 of the men spent time at a Uighur encampment near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, that the lawyers described as an innocent “handful of houses bisected by dirt tracks.”
Weaponry at the “Uighur village,” the detainees said in their military hearings, consisted of a single Kalashnikov rifle and a pistol. They strongly criticized Chinese policies that they said included forced abortions, political imprisonments and torture of dissidents.
But Bush administration officials said that among the Uighur prisoners were three men who had been captured in an active battle zone and a firearms trainer, a Uighur who claimed he had been mistaken for someone else. The Bush administration said the outpost was a training camp run by a Uighur resistance group that was listed by the State Department in 2002 as a terrorist group, the East Turkistan Islamic Movement.
That designation has raised as many questions as it answered. The listing, which came after the 17 men were already prisoners, came at China’s urging at a time when American diplomats were pressing for Beijing’s support for the coming war in Iraq.
The State Department has acknowledged that the Chinese used the terrorist listing to justify a harsh crackdown on Uighur separatists, much like the Beijing government’s better-known policies toward Tibet.
But experts on China argue that the American designation of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement appeared to be based on misinformation. In 2002, China claimed that at least eight fractious, little-known Uighur groups had committed more than 200 terrorist acts over 11 years. But a few months later, the American listing blamed the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, known as ETIM, for all of the supposed acts of terrorism.
“Suddenly everything was ETIM,” said James Millward, a historian at Georgetown University who has written about the terrorism designation.
Dru C. Gladney, a China expert at Pomona College, said the confusion might have exaggerated the importance of the East Turkistan group, which, he said, may have had as few as 10 members.
Still, several detainees acknowledged in testimony that their encampment in Afghanistan had ties to a Uighur expatriate, Hasan Mahsum, who described himself as the leader of the separatist ETIM.
Mr. Mahsum denied that his group had connections to Al Qaeda. But that denial hardly put an end to the issue. He was killed by the Pakistani army in 2003 in a raid on what Pakistan described as a Qaeda hideout.
The Uighur files inherited by the Obama administration are full of such ambiguities, the public records suggest. Still, five former Bush administration officials said in interviews that they knew of no effort to gather new information on the men, even after a federal appeals court last June ridiculed the secret intelligence on the Uighur detainees as nothing more than hearsay.
In a ruling against the Bush administration, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said there was reason to believe that the source of the unattributed claims had been none other than the government of China, which the court noted might have been far from objective.
But, a former Bush administration official said, “nobody was going to go back and look at the facts again.”
Several of the former officials would discuss the intelligence issues only if granted anonymity so they would not be seen as disclosing confidential consultations.
But Andrew J. Puglia Levy, who was deputy general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, said the information raised enough questions to convince the Bush administration that the men should never be permitted into the United States.
"It’s hard to say there’s a no-risk scenario,” Mr. Levy said.
The United States has said it would not release the men to China, which has demanded their return, because it fears mistreatment or torture. But since 2006, when Albania took five Uighurs from Guantánamo, some 100 other countries have refused to take the 17 others, State Department officials say.
The Uighurs’ lawyers say the facts that matter most about their clients are that the men are still not free, even after the court ridiculed the intelligence and the Bush administration withdrew its claims that they were enemy combatants.
The lead lawyer, P. Sabin Willett, said the contradiction was powerful when he visited a client in the fall and the man was still in shackles.
“A guy is chained to the floor, and even the court says he’s not the enemy,” Mr. Willett said bitterly.
For Uighur exiles in this country, the Guantánamo issue has been bewildering. They see the United States, which has granted some of them asylum, as a powerful ally against China. Yet that same country labeled some of their fellow Uighurs as terrorists.
Rebiya Kadeer, a former political prisoner in China who may be the most prominent Uighur leader in the United States, displayed the complexities of the Guantánamo issue for the exiles in a long interview. Her voice quivering with emotion, Mrs. Kadeer described her own imprisonment as the act of an authoritarian government.
A poorly educated entrepreneur in the 1980s and 1990s, Mrs. Kadeer was once said to have been the richest woman in what China calls the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Dissidence brought the end of her Audi, her three villas and her far-flung business empire, which included department stores and a steel trading company.
After a conviction largely for mailing newspaper articles about separatism to her husband, who already had asylum in the United States, Mrs. Kadeer, now 62, disappeared into China’s prisons and work camps for more than five years.
She said she was persistently threatened with death and forced to “confess” repeatedly that Xinjiang properly belonged to China. Because of American pressure, Mrs. Kadeer was released to this country in 2005.
She described the detention of her countrymen at Guantánamo as “a mistake.” But, she added, “at least they’re alive,” a fate she said would not be guaranteed if they had been sent home.
Mr. Hassan, the exile who once taught at a technical college in Xinjiang, said he fled his country after a failed plan to kill him.
He boarded a bus, he said, and grieved for what he knew might be the loss forever of his wife and 11-year old son. “I saw my wife looking back at the bus,” Mr. Hassan said. In the Washington area, he joined a tight-knit circle of Uighur expatriates, people who have traveled a similar path out of China gather to celebrate holidays.
There are few old people because they were left behind. But the parents and some 40 children and teenagers gather to discuss their dreams. Often, they say, Chinese agents watch them.
Mr. Hassan, though, seemed at ease. He was grateful, he said, to the countless people who helped him get here. So he signed up when he heard some months ago that detainees’ lawyers wanted to present a relocation plan in court. More than a dozen Uighurs here offered shelter to any of their countrymen who might win freedom from Guantánamo.
Mr. Hassan said he and the 17 detainees had a lot in common.
“We have the same goal for freedom from Chinese rule,” he said. “They sacrificed for our cause.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 2, 2009An article on Tuesday about Uighur detainees in
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