Washington, Jun 16, 2009 - A Defense Intelligence Agency expert on Chinese counterintelligence operations once said that “it is the mother’s milk of counterintelligence to create phony political organizations.” He stated also that the Chinese are especially good at it and utilize this method in order to know who to watch and who to eventually eliminate. Phony or “front” organizations can also be used to tarnish good causes by blaming them for violence against innocent people when in fact government agencies committed it themselves. We have good reason to believe that this may have been the case with some so-called Uighurs organizations.

Much to my dismay some pundits in the Republican Party have fallen for the bait and lump the Uighurs in with Islamic extremists.

The Bush Administration did not help matters. It held Uighurs in Guantanamo and labeled them as terrorists to appease the Chinese government in a pathetic attempt to gain its support at the beginning of the war against Iraq and to assure China’s continued purchases of U.S. treasuries. Many if not all of the negative allegations against the Uighurs can be traced back to Chinese intelligence, whose purpose is to snuff out an independence movement that challenges the communist bosses in Beijing. No patriot, especially no Reagan Republican, should fall for this manipulation which has us doing Beijing’s bidding.

In the Hall of Shame is Newt Gingrich. His positioning on this should be of no surprise to those of us who during Newt’s leadership in the House opposed his active support for Clinton era trade policies with Communist China, policies that have now had a disastrous impact on our economy while bolstering China’s economic and military prowess. Most Favored Nation’s trading status should never have been granted to this vicious dictatorship. Newt and the big corporations that persuaded members of congress in the 1990s to go along with President Bill Clinton’s economic embrace of Communist China did no favor to our country or to the people of the United States. Our current economic vulnerability to a dictatorship, the world’s worst human rights abuser, can be traced back to that morally flawed policy in the 1990s.

Within the span of 20 years we have gone from having a trade deficit with Communist China of $1.7 billion to over $300 billion today. We are losing about 650,000 jobs a month and it is obvious to anyone who bothers to read labels that almost everyone of those jobs are going to Communist China. The Chinese Communist Party has accumulated a $2 trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund by producing and selling American brand products to Americans who once produced those same products here on American soil. Moving derivatives, stocks and bonds or paper from one side of the table to the other doesn’t create wealth. Manufacturing jobs do. This basic fact has not been lost on the Communist bosses. Now our leaders beg the Chinese to buy our treasuries. Thanks to our so-called leaders, Republican and Democrat, America was set on a path to economic oblivion.

Have we sunk so low and drifted so far away from our principles and that we accept our leaders doing the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party by attacking people who protest against Beijing’s repressive rule? Newt should explain to this committee how occupied East Turkestan is any different from present day occupied Tibet or Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia during the Cold War. He should explain why he has been doing the bidding of the communist Chinese dictatorship, using Chinese intelligence as a source of information against people seeking democracy and self determination.

Many conservatives knowledgeable about the facts have come out in opposition to such cheap short term political posturing. Those who support the release of the Uighurs from GTMO includes: Stephen A. Abraham, Lieutenant Colonel, Military Intelligence, United States Army Reserve (Ret.); Mickey Edwards, President, Aspen Institute, Lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University; former Member of Congress (R-OK) and Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee; Richard A. Epstein, Professor, University of Chicago; Thomas B. Evans, Jr., Former Member of Congress (R-Del.) and former co-chairman of Republican National Committee, Bruce Fein, former Associate Deputy Attorney General to Ronald Reagan, David Keene, Chairman American Conservative Union, William S. Sessions, former director of the FBI, former Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas; Don Wallace, Jr., Georgetown University Professor of Law; Chairman, International Law Institute; John W. Whitehead, President, The Rutherford Institute; Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. The list is long and varied, including not only well respected politicians, but important and influential academics and members of civil society.

An ongoing attempt to appease Communist China has been behind the detention of the Uighurs currently being held in Guantanamo. By detaining the Uighurs, the United States was and still is an accomplice in China’s continued brutal occupation of East Turkestan and discrimination against the Uighur people. Both Republican and Democratic parties need to recognize this mistake and correct it, we certainly should not cower and kow tow to Beijing.

It is my hope that this hearing will help to dispel some of the serious confusion and propaganda about the Uighurs.