Editor's note: The following letter was submitted by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who serves as Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight, in response to this blog post by Thomas Joscelyn.

Despite the court rulings declaring the Uighurs continued detention in GITMO as unjust and the decision by the Obama administration to finally release them, there are still naysayers who refuse to believe the Uighurs pose no threat to the United States. They never have. Rather, the Uighurs are a Muslim ethnic minority from a remote section of China, who desired to learn how to protect themselves and their homeland against the persecution of the brutal Chinese communist regime. In that quest, they became a pawn in a bigger global chess game between the United States and China's veto wielding power on the U.N. Security Council at a time when the U.S. needed China's support for the impending invasion of Iraq. The naysayers, who continue to dismiss this correlation, seem to be more interested in politically expedient fear mongering than the actual facts.

The House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight, of which I am the Ranking Member, held two hearings on June 10 and June 16. The hearings respectively focused on the Uighurs historic persecution in the occupied East Turkestan region of China and the nature of Uighur nationalism versus terrorism. Several witnesses during those hearings took issue with the recent news reports and editorials accusing the Uighurs of being associated with al Qaeda affiliated groups, specifically the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), engaging in terrorist camp weapons training and allegedly posing a national security threat to the United States.

The oft-repeated accusation that the Uighurs held at Gitmo were members of the ETIM is patently false. Not only have the Uighurs themselves categorically denied this, according to their Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) statements, but every federal court that has reviewed the case has ruled in favor of the Uighurs. The U.S. District Court of Appeals issued a detailed opinion in Parhat v. Gates (2008) that found no evidence of Huzaifa Parhat's membership in the ETIM. It rejected the government's ETIM evidence as "wholly inadequate" on the grounds that it did not establish that ETIM was associated with al Qaeda, or the Taliban, or that they engaged in hostilities against the U.S. or its coalition partners.

Which brings up the curious decision by the United States to designate the ETIM a terrorist group in 2002. During the June 16 subcommittee hearing, Dr. Sean Roberts, associate professor of practice for the Elliot School of International Affairs at The George Washington University, testified that few scholars studying the Uighur people had ever heard of the ETIM in 2002. Dr. Dru C. Gladney, professor, Pomona College, also testified that "it came as a surprise at the conclusion of his August 2002 visit to Beijing, that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage identified ETIM as the main coordinating Uighur group to be targeted as an international terrorist group. At the time, very few people including activists deeply engaged in working for an independent East Turkistan, had ever heard of the ETIM."

A Defense Intelligence Agency analyst working on Chinese counterintelligence operations once said, "It's the mother's milk of counterintelligence to create phony political organizations." He also stated that the Chinese are especially good at it and utilize this method in order to know who to watch and who to eventually eliminate.

More after the jump...