Chinese Gave Orders For Gitmo Prisoner (Mis)Treatment

That prisoners at the US-run detention camp at Guantanamo Bay have been subjected to harsh treatment, including being kept awake for days at a time, subjected to extreme cold and forcibly restrained isn't new information, that this treatment was done to them on the orders of Chinese officials though is.

Those are the latest revelations to come out of Congressional hearings on Gitmo. The prisoners in question, of course, are the Uighurs - the Muslim ethnic group from China's northwest Xinjiang province. Nearly two-dozen Uighurs were captured in Afghanistan in 2002 by, according to McClatchy Newspapers, Afghan bounty hunters paid $5,000 per 'terrorist' they turned in. Several of the now-released Uighurs (the US eventually cleared them of any terrorist involvement) are claiming that they were told by their US interrogators at Gitmo that the harsh treatment was on the orders of Chinese officials to 'soften them up' for further interrogation by Chinese who would soon be visiting the camp.

Right now I don't want to continue the debate on whether 'harsh interrogation techniques' are a justified tactic in the War on Terror or just a fancy term for 'torture', but what really makes me angry in this case is that US soldiers were employing them on the orders of a foreign government. "I had never thought that American soldiers would work with Chinese and treat us like this," said Uighur detainee Abu Bakker Qassim, released and now living in exile in Albania.

And I'm not the only one angry. The Congress members at the hearing ripped into the official representing the Department of Defense, asking why the DoD gave the Chinese access to prisoners at Gitmo, while keeping members of Congress out. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican from California asked "Chinese communist government officials and their agents have information and we cannot? Would you think that is a bit absurd?" Democrat Jim Moran went one better threatening to cut off funding for Gitmo if Congress didn't get some better answers.

The other thing that has me (and it should you too) fired up over this is that the Uighurs were captured, not by US troops on some anti-terror raid, or as the result of intelligence to disrupt a terrorist plot, but by some bounty hunters? It reminds me of the Old West when the US Army would pay for Indian scalps, not really caring where (or from whom) they came from. Since we ultimately decided that the Uighurs were innocent, it makes you wonder how many other 'terrorists' at Gitmo - and in US detention elsewhere - are just guys scooped up by some Afghan bounty hunter trying to make a quick buck off the War on Terror?