The men, a small band of Chinese Muslims who have been held for nearly seven years, are no longer considered enemy combatants by the U.S. government, but they are caught in a well-documented diplomatic bind. Unlike other captives, they cannot be sent to their home country because Beijing considers them terrorists, and they might be tortured. The government released five of the detainees, known as Uighurs (pronounced "WEE-gurz"), to Albania in 2006, but no other country wants to risk offending China by accepting the others."
"Scores of detainees are challenging their detentions in federal court after winning a Supreme Court ruling in June that gave them the right to have their cases reviewed by federal judges under the legal doctrine of habeas corpus.
U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon has been conducting closed-door hearings in the cases of more than 20 of those detainees and intends to hold habeas hearings at a brisk pace, beginning later this month. First in line are six Algerians who were picked up in Bosnia in late 2001. Each detainee is scheduled to have a hearing over a six-day period."
"The government suffered a major setback in June when a federal appeals court found the evidence against one Uighur to be so weak that it compared the government's legal theories to a nonsensical 19th-century poem, Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark." The court ordered the man, Huzaifa Parhat, released, transferred or offered a new military hearing.
The government chose not to retry Parhat and announced it would no longer treat him as an enemy combatant. It subsequently did the same for four others and added the final 12 on Tuesday."
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