The Supreme Court has agreed to take up the case of several Chinese Uighurs still being held at Guantanamo Bay prison despite the fact that they were determined not to be enemy combatants. The Uighurs, members of an embattled Chinese Muslim ethnic minority, have not been released to China because of fear that they might be abused -- but a DC circuit court decision last February also determined that U.S. courts had no authority to order their release into the United States. The Supreme Court will be reconsidering the lower court's decision, which civil libertarians contend unfairly curtails the habeas rights of detainees.
Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer for the ACLU's National Security Project, which filed an amicus brief in favor of the SCOTUS hearing the case, praised the court's decision. “If a court rules that a detention is illegal but cannot issue a remedy by directing a detainees release," Hafetz says, "then habeas is essentially a dead letter, and the courts are powerless to correct lawless executive action.” He added that the lower court's decision was a "direct assault" on the Supreme Court's decision in the Bourmediene v. Bush case that granted habeas rights to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
Part of the administration's apprehension about releasing the Uighurs into the United States is that Republicans, including Newt Gingrich, sought to portray them as dangerous terrorists who were a security risk. In an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, Gingrich called them "trained mass killers instructed by the same terrorists responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001." Gingrich also linked the Uighurs to the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, an Al Qaeda affiliated terrorist group the detained Uighurs said they've never heard of.
The Uighurs seemed puzzled -- at the time they responded through a translator, asking, "Why does he hate us so much and say those kinds of things?"
Earlier this year, the U.S. transferred four Uighurs to Bermuda, and arranged for the transfer of several others to Palau.
-- A. Serwer
