Gingrich opines on closing Gitmo

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) made his debut as a weekly columnist in the Washington Examiner on Friday, choosing to write about President Obama’s decision to close Guantanamo Bay.

Gingrich discusses the Uighurs, Chinese Muslims of which there are 17 currently held at Gitmo. The group is allied with Al Gaeda affiliated groups and if Obama goes through with his plan to release the Uighur detainees on American soil, Gringrich writes, there is a large possibility the Uighurs will land in Fairfax County, Va.

Gingrich writes:

But the Obama administration’s plan for the Uighurs doesn’t stop there. At Guantanamo Bay, the Uighurs are known for picking up television sets on which women with bared arms appear and hurling them across the room.

Perhaps understandably, the Obama administration believes the Uighurs will need help getting adjusted to northern Virginia society, in which women with bared arms have been known to appear.

So last month Obama Administration Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair indicated that terrorist detainees released into the United States would receive public assistance. “You can’t just put them on the street,” he said.

…

As you would expect, this army of leftwing activists and high-priced lawyers has led a public relations offense on behalf of the Uighurs to convince nervous suburbanites that the former terrorist detainees will make great neighbors. They claim that the Uighurs are harmless Chinese separatists who have been unjustly detained. Their real problem is with the repressive Chinese government, they claim, not us.

But as you can see, the truth about the Uighurs (which you definitely won’t hear from the anti-Guantanamo legal industry) is very different. Contrary to the claims of their defenders, the Guantanamo Uighurs are not pro-democracy activists unjustly held by American authorities.

Republicans have sought to score points on Democrats on Gitmo recently. As Reid Wilson reported earlier this week, the tact appears to be working, at least initially.

jeremy.jacobs@digital-staging.thehill.com