A Constitutional Win
OUR OPINION: Guantánamo decision rejects arbitrary expansion of executive power
Federal courts appear to have had enough of this administration's high-handed and unconstitutional approach to individual rights. In a breakthrough ruling, a district court in Washington this week ordered the release of 17 detainees at Guantánamo Bay after determining, based on the record, that they did not represent a threat to U.S. security. It's about time.
Late Wednesday, an appellate court stayed the order, giving the administration what should be only a temporary reprieve. The Supreme Court should decide the case.
The 17 men that Federal Judge Ricardo M. Urbina ordered brought into his courtroom on Friday are Turkic Muslims from China, members of the Uighur sect detained seven years ago in Afghanistan. The government has stubbornly refused to release them into the United States even though the military earlier this year finally quit trying to prove that they were ``enemy combatants.''
This left them in limbo. They can't be sent back to China because as anti-communists they might be persecuted, yet other countries that had nothing to do with their situation wouldn't take them either. Why should they?
Judge Urbina rightly reasoned that making the Uighurs languish in prison just because the government won't admit error or take responsibility for their plight is not an acceptable outcome.
At the heart of this dispute lies the administration's insistence on its right to hold war-on-terror captives at Guantánamo without judicial review. In June, the Supreme Court rejected this argument as an unconstitutional expansion of executive power. It declared that lower courts can review the status of detainees. That opened the door for Judge Urbina's decision that the government had insufficient grounds to continue holding the Uighurs.
It's time, as Judge Urbina ruled, ''to shine the light of constitutionality'' on these unjust detentions.
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