Ilshat Hassan, a Uighur refugee from China, has offered to take one of the Guantánamo Uighurs into his McLean, Va., apartment.

By WILLIAM GLABERSON and MARGOT WILLIAMS

WASHINGTON — Ilshat Hassan’s flight from China has brought refuge, a job at the consulting firm Booz Allen and an apartment in the Virginia suburbs.

Mr. Hassan, an intense former college professor, is among some 300 exiles from western China’s Uighur Muslim minority who live peacefully in the Washington area, where the American government has supported their pro-democracy efforts. But while the United States is hosting Mr. Hassan and the others, it has been imprisoning 17 of their countrymen in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

“Their story is my story,” said Mr. Hassan, an edge in his voice. He meant his account of escape in 2003 from a repressive Chinese government. Not the particulars, which, in the cases of the 17 Uighur detainees, have included seven years of isolation and despair.

The Uighurs have become something of a Guantánamo Rorschach test: hapless refugees to some, dangerous plotters to others. For the Obama administration, the task of determining which of those portraits is correct and whether the men can be released inside the United States has raised the stakes for the president’s plan to close the Guantánamo prison. Either choice is likely to provoke intense reaction.

The dilemma has taken on new urgency because the plan to close the prison depends on other countries’ accepting some of the remaining 241 detainees Diplomats say that with President Obama embarking on Tuesday on a European trip, the effort could falter unless this country signals it is willing to take some of the Guantánamo prisoners.

At home, though, Mr. Obama faces the prospect of a storm of protest from some quarters if he admits detainees the Bush administration labeled terrorists and barred from this country. Already, word of the men’s possible release has brought denunciations and anxiety from military groups, families of Sept. 11 victims and political figures.

“I don’t think people want people that could potentially be terrorists in the United States,” said Representative J. Randy Forbes, Republican of Virginia.

There were signs on Tuesday that the decision-making process was accelerating. Administration officials were in Guantánamo interviewing the 17 men to assess their suitability for release, perhaps in the United States, one official said.

But a detailed review of thousands of pages of documents suggests that definitive answers about who the 17 Uighurs really are will be hard to find. The public record, including intelligence and other materials from court cases and military hearings, often presents a hazy picture.

The men ended up in American hands in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001 and 2002, in some cases after the payment of bounties. Their life stories are inexact: hat maker, shoe repairman, typist in the Uighurs’ Turkic language. The evidence against them has been declared dubious by federal courts. But former Bush administration officials said in interviews that there had been no serious effort to clear up the mysteries.

Still, in the Uighur expatriate community here, Mr. Hassan and other refugees argue it is clear the men pose no danger. They have offered to take in the men should they be released. Freeing the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs) would be a singular moment in the debate over the Guantánamo prison: critics would see a final judgment that innocent men were locked away there.

The specific intentions of the Uighurs in Afghanistan in 2001 are hard to define. “There is nothing else there but to learn to fight the Chinese, and then go back again,” one of them told a military panel.

The Bush administration conceded last fall that none of the men were enemy combatants. Then the Justice Department argued that they should never be admitted into this country because they “sought to wage terror” in China.

Lawyers for the men called that accusation “imprisonment by defamation.” They focus on evidence that 13 of the men spent time at a Uighur encampment near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, that the lawyers described as an innocent “handful of houses bisected by dirt tracks.”

Weaponry at the “Uighur village,” the detainees said in their military hearings, consisted of a single Kalashnikov rifle and a pistol. They strongly criticized Chinese policies that they said included forced abortions, political imprisonments and torture of dissidents.

But Bush administration officials said that among the Uighur prisoners were three men who had been captured in an active battle zone and a firearms trainer, a Uighur who claimed he had been mistaken for someone else. The Bush administration said the outpost was a training camp run by a Uighur resistance group that was listed by the State Department in 2002 as a terrorist group, the East Turkistan Islamic Movement.

That designation has raised as many questions as it answered. The listing, which came after the 17 men were already prisoners, came at China’s urging at a time when American diplomats were pressing for Beijing’s support for the coming war in Iraq.

The State Department has acknowledged that the Chinese used the terrorist listing to justify a harsh crackdown on Uighur separatists, much like the Beijing government’s better-known policies toward Tibet.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Bush Administration, China, Chinese, Guantanamo, Muslim Minority, Obama Administration, Pakistan, Uighur

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