Chinese Islam and the Case of the Disappearing Prison

What do you do when you’re trying to shut down a high-profile prison for unofficially accused international terrorists? Ship the prisoners off to a nation of disappearing islands.
The U.S. might shortly begin sending Chinese Muslim prisoners from its facility at Guantanamo Bay – itself an extra-judicial territory, or semi-sovereign administrative enclave, that both is and is not part of the United States – to a terrestrially complicated new situation in the Pacific island nation of Palau.
Palau, of course, is disappearing.
From one black hole to another, then.

(Via @pruned).

9 thoughts on “Chinese Islam and the Case of the Disappearing Prison”

  1. my guess is these islands won't have steve mcqueen or dustin hoffman.

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070511/

    i guess we have become the defacto dumping ground for "terrorists" er, i mean enemies of the state, i mean, political prisoners, well…quite the free country we have.

  2. If they're just gonna go from one place to another, the entire closure of Gitmo is redundant. I thought the purpoe of Obama's campaign promice was supposed to be of judicial closure, that is, sentencing or releasing as is appropriate. A dubiously held prisoner is a dubiously held prisoner whether they're in Cuba or Palau. Kinda pathetic really.
    If they had actually been sentenced and were being imprisoned, then that's fair enough.

    On the other hand, intentionally building a prison on doomed land could be a good idea. It could be built like an oil rig, with piers raising it high above the surface of Palau. And then as the waves rose, the land would vanish, leaving only the prison. An environmental security upgrade.

  3. Ben I don't think "redundant" is the word you're looking for. Smoke screen, bait & switch, or lie more readily come to mind.

    I don't think that I'll ever believe in hope again.

  4. I think every person in those prisons should be sent back to their native country…maybe to start a new life…maybe some of them are wrongly accused, we'll never know. We can't always assume that each and every prisoner deserves to be on a disappearing island.

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