U.S. used Gitmo Uighurs as 'diplomatic chip'

Lawyers for seven Chinese Uighur Muslims held at Guantanamo since early 2002 are calling for their immediate release, charging that they have been detained by the United States to pressure Beijing to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

According to a suit filed Monday in Washington, the lawyers said the seven men were among a group of 22 Uighurs who had been captured by mistake in the U.S.'s "War on terror".

The 22 Uighurs were transferred to Guantanamo from Afghanistan, where they had fled to from China.

The men never posed a threat to the United States and were being held by the U.S. in an attempt to secure China's support for the Iraq War, the lawyers said.

"The Uighurs -- and specifically the Uighurs in Guantanamo -- became a diplomatic chip in this high-stake game, a quid pro quo for Chinese acquiescence in the administration's Iraq policy," said the lawyers Sabin Willett and Susan Baker Manning from the U.S. legal firm Bingham McCutchen.

"We are urging the Court of Appeal to act on this quickly," Willett told AFP.

The suit also challenges the U.S.'s classification of the detainees as enemy combatants; a status that Washington has used to illegally detain hundreds of men at Guantanamo without charges since 2002.

The lawyers say the panels that branded their clients as "enemy combatants" were deeply flawed and depended on the same information that acquitted five other Uighurs, who were released last May and given political asylum in Albania.

The remaining 10 Uighurs are represented by different lawyers but Willett said most of them were in the same predicament.

"Political deal"

Quoting new laws that allow Guantanamo prisoners to challenge their status as "enemy combatants", the lawyers argued that the seven Uighurs had never taken up arms against the United States or its allies.

The men were wrongfully branded as "terrorist" suspects because they oppose the communist Chinese government, they said.

The United States classified the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) - a group that includes Uighur separatists who want their own nation in western China - as a "terrorist" organization in August 2002 after talks with China about the Iraq invasion, the lawyers charge.

"This was purely a political accommodation to the Chinese," they said.

"More than four years have passed. Long-discarded pawns in a diplomatic match between superpowers, petitioners today remain illegally imprisoned in Guantanamo," they added.

U.S. State Department officials were not immediately available for comment.

But ex-department officials admitted that they had held talks with China about classifying ETIM and another group as known terrorist organizations.

Muslim Uighurs seek greater autonomy and some want independence from China, but Beijing keeps a tight grip on Xinjiang; where the nation's relatively small Muslim community lives.

Human rights group accuse China of carrying out a "crushing campaign of religious repression" against Muslim Uighurs.