NYT: Judge orders five detainees freed from Guantanamo:

After the first hearing on the government’s evidence for holding detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, a federal judge ruled on Thursday that five of the prisoners are not being lawfully held and ordered their release.

The case, involving six Algerians detained in Bosnia in 2001, was an important test of the Bush administration’s detention policies, which critics have long argued swept up innocent men and low-level foot soldiers along with high-level and hardened terrorists.

The hearings for the Algerian men, in which all evidence was heard in proceedings closed to the public, were the first in which the Department of Justice presented its full justification for holding specific detainees since the Supreme Court ruled in June that Guantánamo detainees have a constitutional right to contest their imprisonment in habeas corpus suits.

Ruling from the bench, Judge Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court in Washington said that the information gathered on the men had been sufficient to hold them for intelligence purposes, but was not strong enough in court.

The judge was a Bush I appointee, who had been expected to be sympathetic to the government. "The decision, lawyers said, is likely to be seen as a major judicial repudiation of the Bush administration’s effort to use the detention center at the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as a way to avoid scrutiny by American judges. President-elect Obama has said he will close the prison."

A friend notes on today's developments, "The judge, a Bush appointee who was widely believed to have fast-tracked this set of habeas hearings with the notion of giving Bush an early win before others come in, apparently made a pretty emotional appeal to the government not to appeal his decision that five of the six were not enemy combatants, which I presume means there is no longer any basis for holding them - the judge apparently told the government that they would get to make all their legal arguments when the defense (whom the judge did NOT encourage not to appeal) makes their appeal for the one detainee whom the judge ruled did qualify as an enemy combatant. In other words - interpreting - this judge, not exactly the most predisposed toward the defense, emotionally appealed to the government just to let these poor five fellows, who were detained in the first place under very very suspicious circumstances, go after so many years of unjustified imprisonment."

Posted by Laura at November 20, 2008 12:46 PM