Appellate Law

Uighurs to come to homeland to roost

By S. COTUS

SCOTUSblog has a post which begins:

A federal judge has ordered the government to release a group of 17 Chinese Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay into the United States, and to present them in his courtroom at 10 a.m. this Friday for a handover to local caretakers.

No hard copy of the order yet.  If you have not been following the story, these are the Uighurs that the government concedes are not ?enemy combatants,? nor are the likely to return to the battlefield.  This probably won?t stop lawyers that talk to the little people from saying the opposite.  Update: sure enough, the administration talks down to the "f**cking little people" (as one political appointee called them) by saying this:

..if allowed to stand, [the order] could be used as precedent for other detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, including sworn enemies of the United States suspected of planning the attacks of 9/11, who may also seek release into our country.

Whatever the case, this means that over the next three days we will see if the government wants to go to the DC Circuit or not.  Whatever the case, this is just the beginning of a legal mess that the next administration will have to untangle.

Full post as published by Appellate Law and Practice on October 07, 2008 (boomark / email).