Saturday, June 09, 2007

High Plains Drifters

New York Times Saturday June 9

The story is that the US released these guys from Guantanamo. No one but Albania would take them.
Most of the five Uighurs in Tirana said they had left their homes in China’s far-western Xinjiang Province, an area the Uighurs call East Turkestan, to earn more money for their families and escape government harassment. They said they drifted into Afghanistan after travels through other Central Asian countries, and heard that the Uighur hamlet was a place where they could get free food and shelter while trying to figure out where to go next.

Assuming it's true, how stupid does one have to be to "drift" into Afghanistan?

from the same article:

One prospect was the west African republic of Gabon, which has a small Muslim minority. Gabon’s long-ruling president, Omar Bongo, said he was open to accepting the Uighurs. But according to two officials, he wanted not only compensation for resettling the refugees, but support for international loans to his government and a meeting with President Bush at the White House. He had already had one such meeting just months earlier, on May 26, 2004.

A small corrupt African country led by President Bongo?

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