Appeals Court Stops Release of 17 Detainees in U.S.
The federal appeals court in Washington on Wednesday unanimously overturned a judge’s order that would have freed 17 detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, into the United States, adding a new complication to the Obama administration’s efforts to close the prison there.
The ruling by the three-judge panel did not bar the president from permitting American resettlement of the men, members of the largely Muslim Uighur minority in western China. Such resettlement, diplomats say, would encourage other countries to accept detainees.
But the ruling would make resettlement of the Uighur detainees in the United States more difficult politically because the original court order that was overturned would have provided a legal justification. In the October decision, Judge Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court said the men had never fought the United States and were not a security threat.
The appeals court ruling came on a day the attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., underscored the priority the Obama administration places on closing the prison. “We are moving along” in efforts to begin the case-by-case review of the remaining 245 detainees ordered by President Obama, he said.
Mr. Holder will travel to Guantánamo Bay on Monday, he said, “to really see what is going on down at the facility.”
In the ruling, all three judges of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed to reverse Judge Urbina’s decision. But the judges split 2-to-1 in a bitter disagreement about the meaning of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in June that gave detainees a right to challenge their detention using the centuries-old legal proceeding known as habeas corpus.
The majority said the Supreme Court decision, Boumediene v. Bush, did not give judges the power to release detainees in this country. “Never in the history of habeas corpus,” the majority wrote, “has any court thought it had the power to order an alien held overseas brought into the sovereign territory of a nation and released into the general population.”
But Judge Judith W. Rogers disagreed, writing that Wednesday’s ruling “ignores the very purpose” of the writ of habeas corpus, to serve as “a check on arbitrary executive power.”
If Judge Urbina did not have the power to order the men released in the United States, the Supreme Court’s decision would have no meaning, wrote Judge Rogers, a Clinton appointee. But she said Judge Urbina should have considered whether immigration law provided a separate ground for continuing to hold the men.
After imprisoning the men for nearly seven years, the Bush administration conceded that it would no longer try to prove that the men were enemy combatants. But it argued that the men should not be permitted into the United States, claiming they had “trained for armed insurrection against their home country” in a Uighur camp in Afghanistan.
The appeals court stayed Judge Urbina’s ruling, and the men remained in the Guantánamo Bay prison during the appeal. Wednesday’s decision was written by Judge Arthur R. Randolph, an appointee of the first President George Bush. Judge Karen Henderson, a Reagan appointee, voted with Judge Randolph.
American officials have said for years that the men could not be returned to China and that they could not find another country willing to accept them. Officials say Uighur prisoners might be tortured or killed by the Chinese government, which has a stern policy toward its Muslim population in the region.
Lawyers for the men said they were reviewing their options, which could include asking the Supreme Court to review the case. One of their lawyers, Susan Baker Manning, said the ruling meant innocent people “can spend the rest of their lives in prison even though the U.S. knows it’s a mistake.”
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