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Five of six Algerians must be released after nearly seven years of captivity at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, a federal judge ruled on Thursday in a setback for the Bush administration.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled from the bench after holding the first hearings under a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June that gave Guantanamo prisoners the legal right to challenge their continued confinement.
U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to close the prison camp after he takes office in January. Meanwhile, U.S. judges in Washington are moving ahead with case-by-case reviews of about 200 detainee legal challenges.
Reading his ruling as the detainees listened in Guantanamo via a telephone hookup, Leon said the U.S. government failed to show the five detainees who had been living in Bosnia had planned to travel to Afghanistan to fight against U.S. forces.
He ordered the U.S. government to take all necessary and diplomatic steps to facilitate their release "forthwith."
There are about 255 detainees at Guantanamo, which was set up in January 2002 to hold 'terrorism suspects' captured after the September 11 attacks on the United States. Most have been held for years without being charged and many have complained of abuse.
The Algerians were picked up by Bosnian authorities in October 2001 and were sent in January 2002 to Guantanamo, where they have been held as "enemy combatants" without being charged.
After they were detained in 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush said the six men had been planning a bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo.
But last month, Justice Department attorneys said they were no longer relying on those accusations to justify the continued detention of the six men. They said the Algerians planned to go to Afghanistan to fight U.S. forces.
Can't judge source's credibility
But in ordering the release of the five men, Leon said the allegation was based on a single source, and he did not have enough information to judge the source's reliability or credibility.
The judge ruled the government did provide enough evidence that one of the detainees, Belkacem Bensayah, had planned to take up arms against the United States in Afghanistan.
The judge's ruling was the second involving Guantanamo prisoners seeking their release and another defeat for the Bush administration.
Last month, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina ordered the release of 17 Chinese Muslims, members of the Uighur ethnic group, after the government acknowledged they were not enemy combatants.
But a U.S. appeals court has stayed their release from Guantanamo while it considers a Justice Department appeal.
Leon, who was appointed to the bench by Bush in 2002, held closed hearings earlier in November to consider the government's factual basis for holding the six detainees. The hearings were closed because of classified evidence.
Leon was the first federal judge to hold a full hearing under habeas corpus -- a long-standing legal principle by which people can challenge their imprisonment -- in a Guantanamo case since the Supreme Court's ruling.
The six Algerians were among the more than 30 Guantanamo prisoners who won before the Supreme Court. The five ordered released were Lakhdar Boumediene, Mohamed Nechla, Hadj Boudella, Mustafa Ait Idir and Saber Lahmar.
Leon said the U.S. government has the right to appeal his ruling on the five detainees, but he strongly urged top Bush administration officials to forego an appeal, saying it would take as long as two years.
Leon also cautioned that the case was "unique" and that "few if any" of the other detainee challenges were like it. "As a result, the precedential value should be limited," he said.
Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell declined to comment.
PHOTO CAPTION
This file picture taken in July 2008 shows an image reviewed by the US Military of a watch tower at the detention center, in Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base, in Cuba.
Al-Jazeera
