The U.S. government recently sent six Chinese suspects of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement from a military prison at Guantanamo Bay to the Pacific island nation of Palau.

The short-sighted connivance was not only to the detriment of the interests of both China and the United States, it also was a blow to the international cause of antiterrorism.

The East Turkistan Islamic Movement, a group on the sanction list of the U.N. Security Council's 1267 Committee, has carried out a large number of violent terror attacks involving explosions, assassination, robbery, poisoning and arson in numerous countries since the 1990s.

The group which has an intimate relationship with al-Qaeda and the Taliban threatens stability and security in China and northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in particular, and poses general evil to the Asia-Pacific region and the world as a whole. Its terrorist qualities have been long universally affirmed by the international community.

However, the U.S. has adopted an ambiguous attitude toward such a notorious and crime-ridden terrorist group. Although the U.S., as early as 2002, classified the group as being closely related with the al-Qaeda, it labeled a number of group members arrested in Afghanistan "non-combatants" and made an abortive attempt to release them in the U.S. territory.

From 2006, the U.S. transferred some terror suspects to Albania and Bermuda, and now it has the new target Palau.

Huge sums of capital were indispensable to realize the transfers. According to U.S. media, only for Bermuda's acceptance of four terror suspects affiliated with the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, the U.S. government squandered 200 million U.S. dollars, which were naturally garnered from U.S. tax payers who have agonized over the 9-11 attack, one of the most severe terrorist acts in history.

A victim of terrorism, the United States endured its pain and launched all-out wars against atrocities against humans. Unfortunately, its double-standard action of freeing terror suspects may offset its strenuous anti-terror efforts.

The inadvisable act impaired mutual trust between nations and undermined the basis of international anti-terror cooperation. The transfer of the suspects to a third party in defiance of China's strong opposition and repeated request for their repatriation breached relevant resolutions of the U.N. Security Council and was a refusal of fulfilling international anti-terror obligations.

The unwise act may provide a second birth to the released terrorists, who may finally jeopardize U.S. interests by copying Osama Bin Laden's way of growing on western support and swerving back to bite hard at a later date. Who knows how the East Turkistan Islamic Movement's current pledge of faith in the Western world and the United States will mutate in the future.

The U.S.-initiated war against terror was never sluggish in the eight years since the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York. Nevertheless, terrorist acts still haunt or even surge periodically in many parts of the globe. Reflection on its anti-terror strategies and rectification of some errors appears to be a reasonable job for the United States.

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