As reported in the New York Times:
After the first hearing on the government’s evidence for holding detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, a federal judge ruled on Thursday that five of the prisoners are not being lawfully held and ordered their release.
More after the fold.
As opposed to the case last month, resulting in the release of 17 detainees, these hearings involved the presentation by the Dept. of Justice of its full justification for holding the specific detainees. This is one of the cases that have been slowly moving forward since the Supreme Court's decision in June that upheld the rights of Guantánamo detainees to bring habeas corpus suits to contest their imprisonment.
The five detainees ordered to be released were among the six men which President Bush used as an example to showcase his administration’s anti-terrorism approach in his 2002 state of the union address.
The case, involving six Algerians detained in Bosnia in 2001, was an important test of the Bush administration’s detention policies, which critics have long argued swept up innocent men and low-level foot soldiers along with high-level and hardened terrorists.
Ruling from the bench, Judge Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court in Washington said that the information gathered on the men had been sufficient to hold them for intelligence purposes, but was not strong enough in court.
The decision, lawyers said, is likely to be seen as a major judicial repudiation of the Bush administration’s effort to use the detention center at the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as a way to avoid scrutiny by American judges. President-elect Obama has said he will close the prison.
In an apparent effort to avoid further scutiny by American judges, the Justice Department is now arguing that flaws in the ground rules for the Guatánamo cases would require presentation of classified evidence, and has filed legal motions seeking to stop more than 100 of the other Guantánamo habeas corpus cases from proceeding now.
Updated: Please visit SmileySam's diary on this Gitmo case, which just preceded mine, for additional information.