As you know there are a about a dozen exonerated Uighurs (wee-gurs) in a legal limbo after the US okayed them for release from Gitmo but couldn’t find any country willing to take them.
Earlier this week we learned that they are being released to live in Palau, a nominally independent quasi- US island territory of approximately 20,000 residents in the North Pacific, best known for occasional tourism and for being the scene of one season of the CBS reality series Survivor.
Besides big subsidies for military basing rights, most Palauans earned their living through fishing and subsistence farming. It’s actually an archipelago of hundreds of tiny islands, with eight ‘big’ ones. So the Uighurs should fit right in.
When we heard the news, we thought that whatever the legalities and ethics of the matter it had the makings of a decent Salman Rushdie novel or perhaps a good sitcom. So we decided we’d put together our own screenplay treatment for any producers who might be interested.
Late Update: A decidely luckier group of four Uighurs were sent last night to Bermuda. But now there’s a new controversy because while the country’s elected premier gave the okay, apparently no one told the governor, the representative of the head of state, Queen Elizabeth II.
