WASHINGTON — A federal judge ruled here for the first time Thursday that the Bush administration had no basis for holding several of its long-term prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and he ordered that five of the Algerian natives go free.
The question in the case was whether the men, who lived in Bosnia and had never fought or been near a battlefield, had plotted with Al Qaeda and were planning to fight in Afghanistan. In Thursday's ruling, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, a Bush appointee, said the government's case was weak because it relied on only one unnamed witness who linked the men to Al Qaeda. They deserve to be released, he said.
"This is a good day for the American justice system," said Robert C. Kirsch, part of a team of Boston lawyers who spent much of the last seven years trying to win the Algerian men their freedom. "They were swept up by mistake. This is remarkable because Judge Leon essentially told the government, you don't have a case and you never had a case against these men."
Leon had earlier decided that the Guantanamo prisoners had no right to seek their freedom in court. The Supreme Court in June overruled that decision in the case of Lakhdar Boumediene vs. Bush and said the Guantanamo prisoners had the right to habeas corpus -- to be heard by a judge. However, despite years of litigation, no prisoner at Guantanamo has been released as a result of a judge's order.
In the fall of 2001, the Algerian-born men whose case was decided Thursday were suspected of plotting to bomb the U.S. Embassy in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. But a court in Bosnia rejected the allegation and released the men. Then, U.S. authorities took them into custody and shipped them to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay.
In January 2002, President Bush referred to the case in his State of the Union address. "Our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy," he said.
But when the case went before the judge, the administration's lawyers dropped that claim. Instead, they asserted that the Algerians planned to travel to Afghanistan to take up arms against U.S. forces. Leon concluded there was little or no evidence to prove the men made such a plan.
However, he ruled Thursday that one of six Algerians, Bensayah Belkacem, was linked to Al Qaeda and could be held indefinitely as an "enemy combatant."
