BY CAROL ROSENBERG
crosenberg@MiamiHerald.com
May 05, 2006
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In a document made public late yesterday, a Muslim captive from China cleared of ties to al Qaeda is asking Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for asylum in the United States.
Ahmed Doe, in his 30s, makes the plea in a filing in his court case in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
'It is very hard to understand that I am still languishing in a prison with very little rights even after being found innocent,' he wrote in the letter, dated Jan. 19.
``It is beyond my reasoning . . . that a nation like the United States that has an agenda to promote and protect democratic rights of the oppressed people would treat anyone the way that I have been treated.'
Doe is a Uighur, among about 22 Chinese citizens living in a sort of legal limbo in the custody of U.S. military officials running the offshore detention center at Guantánamo Bay Navy Base in southeast Cuba.
U.S. officials notified Doe and several other Uighurs a year ago that military review panels had concluded they were not enemy combatants, the classification of detainees held at Guantánamo in the U.S. war against terrorism.
Doe, who asks that his real name not be published for fear that communist Chinese officials will retaliate against his family, submitted the letter for translation and security clearance earlier this year, according to his U.S. attorney, Wells Dixon.
Rather than mail it to the State Department, attorneys seeking a solution to the sticky problem of how to get Doe freedom from Guantánamo attached it to his habeas corpus petition.
Because U.S. officials concluded he and other Uighurs would face torture or persecution if returned to China, the U.S. diplomats have for a year sought a third nation to give them asylum.
Meantime, captives like Doe are kept inside a small, fence-and-razor-wire-ringed compound called Camp Iguana, separate from the enemy combatant population -- but under military guard.
Attorneys failed in earlier efforts to get the Uighurs base freedoms similar to Cuban and Haitian migrants awaiting third-country relocation -- barracks housing, odd jobs and Navy cafeteria dining, with a private supervisor, not military guard.
The United States is holding about 490 men and teens of about 36 nationalities -- among them Uighur and Palestinian -- at the prison complex overlooking the Caribbean. Ten so far have been charged before President Bush's Military Commissions, the special war-on-terror chamber set up by the Pentagon as the first U.S. war-crimes tribunal since World War II.
The U.S. Supreme Court decides in June whether a facet of the commissions are constitutional.
Regardless, U.S. diplomats are seeking friendly nations to offer sanctuary to certain Guantánamo captives who have been found not to meet the minimum Pentagon standard to hold them indefinitely as ``enemy combatants.
