HuffPost Now Doing PR for Club Gitmo Guests

The basic tone of this nonsense is Newt Gingrich is bad, the Chinese Uighurs are just poor misunderstood chaps who mysteriously wound up at Club Gitmo.

Here all this time I thought the inmates at Guantanamo Bay were subject to harsh treatment (every news story says so) and living under inhumane conditions? Apparently not. According to the Huffington Post these guys chat often with relatives in the United States and Europe.

You know, pretty soo I might start thinking the left's propaganada about what goes on down there has been, um, misleading.

Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs, detained for more than six years and counting at the American prison at Guantanamo Bay, are firing back at Newt Gingrich, who has accused them of terrorist ties and says that releasing them into the United States would endanger the country.

The seventeen Uighurs told their translator, Rushan Abbas, how they felt when they heard Gingrich's remarks. Abbas has been working with them in Guantanamo since 2002, initially contracted by the Department of Defense. The Uighurs' rejoinder to Gingrich is the first quasi-interview with detainees still imprisoned in Guantanamo.

The Bush administration has cleared the Uighurs for release; five have already been released to third countries. If returned to China, there is a high probability they'd be tortured. A vibrant Uighur community in Northern Virginia has offered to take them in, but Gingrich and others are objecting.

"Why is that our problem?" Gingrich wondered in a recent TV interview. "Why are we protecting these guys? Why does it become an American problem?"

Gingrich pushed further in an op-ed, claiming that '[b]y their own admission, Uighurs being held at Guantanamo Bay are members of or associated with the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), an al Qaeda-affiliated group designated as a terrorist organization under U.S law."

No, they have never admitted that, says Abbas, adding that the Uighurs call the claim "baseless, factless slander against them." Abbas returned from Guantanamo Monday. She now works with the Uighurs' defense attorneys, but said that her comments to the Huffington Post were not intended as advocacy on their behalf.

The Uighurs call relatives in the United States and Europe often, she says, so stay up on the news. They were surprised to hear the accusation from the former Speaker of the House.

I guess Gingrich isn't entitled to his opinion.

Meanwhile, it's apparently escaped noticed of the esteemed journalists at the HuffPost that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid also doesn't want these people on our soil.

QUESTION: If the United States -- if the United States thinks that these people should be held, why shouldn’t they be held in the United States? Why shouldn’t the U.S. take those risks, the attendant risk of holding them, since it’s the one that says they should be held?

REID: I think there’s a general feeling, as I’ve already said, that the American people, and certainly the Senate, overwhelmingly doesn’t want terrorists to be released in the United States. And I think we’re going to stick with that.

QUESTION: What about in imprisoned in the United States?

REID: If you’re...

(CROSSTALK)

REID: If people are -- if terrorists are released in the United States, part of what we don’t want is them be put in prisons in the United States. We don’t want them around the United States.

Of course trusting Dingy Harry isn't always wise, and in fact he's probably just reading his latest poll numbers, which, to put it kindly, are abysmal.