See, though, this peculiar quote in a BBC article from John B. Bellinger III, legal advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:

“[The Uighurs] were properly detained, they were in training camps… but they wanted to fight the Chinese. So there’s no question that we had the proper authority to detain them,” he told the BBC in an interview.

“Since we determined who they were, and that they were not intent on fighting us, we’ve been trying to release them. But China is the only country that wants them back,” he added. [...]

Mr Bellinger said American immigration laws were such that it would be extremely difficult to resettle them in the US, so he welcomed the “first breaking of the ice in European resistance in trying to help out”.

Who, exactly, is “we,” here, as in “we’ve been trying to release them?”  Judge Urbina made it pretty clear back in October that he and the judicial system think they should be out.  It’s the Bush administration, where this guy works, that’s been blocking their release by appealing Urbina’s ruling.  Come to think of it, this is the same administration responsible for locking them up seven years ago, the same people who wanted to throw away the key.  Since they’ve been cleared of all charges now for several years, shouldn’t this administration have started making an effort to resettle them even then?

Granted, I am no expert in US immigration law.  I am sure that settling a military detainee is difficult.  However, it’s not true that only “China” wants these men.  Several Uyghur families in the US have agreed to house the detainees as they adjust to life in the land of the free.  Is it possible that the US has been waiting for a European country (besides Albania) to clean up its mess?

This does make me wonder, where was Sweden in all of this?  Where was the Uyghur community in Germany?  Canada?  Honestly, I couldn’t blame them for considering this an American problem.  The US — my country — detained these men, locked them up, processed them, gripped them tight, kept them firmly inside.  Since they were imprisoned in the American realm, their place in America gained a certain naturalness.  When a country tries to hard to hold onto something, why would it want to give it away?

Then we have the question of US-China relations.  First off, I honestly have no way of knowing under which circumstances exactly the remaining Uyghur detainees were captured and delivered to the US.  It is my suspicion that they were not receiving any sort of military or paramilitary training.  In light of Bellinger’s comments, however, I wonder: Did he just say that the United States tolerates armed insurgency against the People’s Republic of China?  “[T]hey wanted to fight the Chinese … they were not intent on fighting us.”  Does that make them any less of a threat to human life?

To my mind, this can mean one of three things.  1. The United States government wants Uyghurs (and others) to be armed and angry and ready to disrupt the PRC presence in Xinjiang.  2. The US, having declared the men enemy combatants, has found a compromise for them, an identity that makes them insurgents but also prevents their return to China.  3. This is an acceptable story for media consumption, one that draws on preestablished ideas of Muslims in China and that obscures a more complex and bureaucratically byzantine truth.

Update 7:01AM Beijing Time: Caijing Network writes in this Mandarin language report that a reporter in Kuche has confirmed with the local military garrison that the explosions indeed did happen and are not mere rumors as was the case with the phantom Urumqi bus bombings back in March. According to this report, the incidents occured from around 3 AM to 4 AM on Sunday. Witnesses say the explosions occured in the city center, and the blasts were followed by bright flashes and intermittent sounds of gunfire.