A Profile of Rushan Abbas, The Guantánamo Uighurs’ Interpreter

Since 2005, Rushan has been the interpreter for Guantánamo’s Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province, who were seized by opportunistic Pakistani tribesmen, and sold to the US military in December 2001), working first with the men’s lawyers, and, most recently, helping four of the men adjust to a new life of freedom in Bermuda, where they were finally released in June, years after the US government decided that they had been seized by mistake, and eight months after a District Court judge ordered their release into the United States, a ruling that was later overturned by the notoriously Conservative Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and supported by the Obama administration, in one of its most baleful displays of cowardice to date. Full article.

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