``Obama didn't release us. Why?''

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- A group of Muslims from China awaiting a court-ordered release staged a self-styled protest inside their prison camp Monday, waving signs demanding their freedom written in crayon on their Pentagon-issued art supplies.

''We are the Uighurs,'' said one sign. ``We are being oppressed in prison though we had been announced innocent.''

Another: ``We need to freedom.''

The U.S. government has for months been seeking a nation to offer asylum to some 17 Uighurs with Chinese citizenship who fear persecution and perhaps torture if they are returned to their communist-controlled homeland.

Attorney General Eric Holder has said he was willing to resettle some in the United States. But some members of Congress have rebelled, casting them as terrorists and creating a deadlock on the future of the men whom a federal judge ordered released from these remote prison camps in October 2008.

Instead, the military moved the men to a small razor-wire ringed compound called Camp Iguana, away from the 220 foreign captives here still held as enemy combatants. As detainees approved for release, they have been receiving increasingly greater liberties -- such as weekly telephone calls, takeout fried chicken and pizza and a wooden hut set aside to serve as a mosque.

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At one point Monday, one of the Uighur men called out: ``Obama didn't release us. Why?''

Last week, the group approached a visiting TV crew and asked to deliver an oral statement. Guards waved them off, saying that U.S. military censors would destroy any such images.

The U.S. military says it seizes and destroys photos of detainees, even those in which the captives pose for news photographers, under an interpretation of the Geneva Conventions that shields prisoners of war from public humiliation.
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For example, the military has ordered 20 laptop computers to let the men set up a virtual computer lab and acquire some DVD-driven high technology skills in anticipation of their release.

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Their lawyers have argued for years that they admire American democracy and deserve to be resettled on U.S. soil. A Lutheran group in the Washington, D.C. area has offered to help, and religious leaders in Tallahassee, have also offered to sponsor three.

''We were an oppressed nation in China,'' said one sign. ``Now we are being oppressed in America for a second time.''

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