BernieHund: The Political Watchdog

According to the Los Angeles Times a U.S. District Court Judge has ordered that 17 Guantanamo prisoners be brought into his courtroom, where he will decide where they will be released. This is a first.

For the first time, a federal judge has ordered the Bush administration to release prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, ordering 17 Chinese Muslims to be brought to his courtroom on Friday.

U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina said he would hold a hearing to decide where in the U.S. the men could be released. Several religious and social groups, including 20 church leaders from Tallahassee, Fla., said they would help the men resettle in their community.

The judge’s order came more than six years after the men were sent to Guantanamo and more than four years after the Pentagon cleared most of them to be released.

It also comes four months after the Supreme Court ruled judges can order the release of prisoners wrongly held at Guantanamo. Shortly after that ruling, a U.S. appeals court said the government had no basis for holding Huzaifa Parhat, one of the 17 Uighurs who had fled persecution in his native China and who then fled Afghanistan after U.S. bombing raids there.

They were taken captive by locals in Pakistan who turned them over to U.S. authorities who were offering $5,000 bounties for the suspected foreign terrorists.

That’s the story of how the 17 got to Guantanamo. That’s the story of what happens when prisoners or enemy combatants or whatever name the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld warmongers give to them, are not allowed legal representation. The administration has not released them because no country was willing to take them and they could not be returned to their own country of China for fear of persecution.

“The U.S. government has long recognized these men did not pose, and really never posed, a threat to the United States,” said Jennifer Daskal, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch.

Nonetheless, Bush administration lawyers have continued to insist that a judge lacked the authority to release any prisoners from Guantanamo.

Civil liberties advocates hailed the judge’s order as a breakthrough. “This is a historic day for the United States. Finally, we are beginning the process of taking responsibility for our mistakes and fixing them,” said Emi MacLean, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Of course, before we rejoice in justice being served, there is but one sidebar to this ruling.

The Justice Department said it planned to seek a stay of Urbina’s order. His ruling “presents serious national security and separation of powers concerns and raised unprecedented legal issues,” said Brian Roehrkasse, a department spokesman.

According to David Savage, Staff Writer at the L.A. Times, there are approximately 60 prisoners who can be released if only they had a place to go.