Today's Stories

October 9, 2008

Robert Bryce
From Enron to the Current Meltdown

October 8, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Imbecilic Tedium

Linn Washington, Jr.
Palin's Racist Remark

Mike Whitney
To the Bunkers!

Deepak Tripathi
The West is Broke

George C. Wilson
Butter Over Guns? McCain and Obama on Defense Issues

Andy Worthington
Seized in Pakistan

Charles R. Larson
"I'm John McCain and I Approved This Lie"

Patrick Irelan
Ecuador's Choice

Matthew Koehler
Log, Baby, Log: Bailing Out the Timber Industry

Stanley Heller
Time to Design a New Economy

Daniel Gross
Working Class Hero: Alexandra Svoboda

Kimberly Hartke
Raw Milk and Civil Liberties

Website of the Day
Olivia Wilde Does It Early

October 7, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Obama and McCain's Goofy Afghan Bluster

Gary Leupp
Seven Years in Afghanistan:
From "War on Terror" to
"War of Terror"

Uri Avnery
Olmert's Final Divorce
From "All of Eretz Israel"

P. Sainath
The Cop-Out Election
Major Candidates, Congress, Press, All Fail in the Big Crisis

Peter Morici
The Dow Tanks as Bank Bailout Fails to Restore Confidence

Conn Hallinan
The Great Game in the Caucasus:
Bad Moves by Uncle Sam

Martha Rosenberg
Training America's Youth
Today a Pheasant, Tomorrow Osama

Binoy Kampmark
Let's Talk About Extinction:
CERN and Halo

October 6, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
A Futile Bailout as Darkness Falls on America

Mike Whitney
Still on the Edge of the Abyss

Tariq Ali
Goodbye to Grosvenor Square

Emily Horowitz
How People Tell Cops They're Guilty Even When They Aren't

Michael Hudson
What Did Jesus Say?
A Christian Perspective on the Paulson Bank Bailout

Ron Jacobs
Winter Soldiers and Washington's Wars

October 3 - 5, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Paulson's Plan is a Fraud

Saul Landau
The Chutzpah of Hank Paulson

Jonathan Cook
The Souring of a West Bank Romance: Israel's Army and Settlers Fall Out

Andy Worthington
The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials

Dave Marsh
Bono (Himself) Challenges Me to a Debate

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Using the IAEA to Spy on Iran

John Ross
Massacre in Morelia

Brian Cloughley
The Unacceptable Face of Capitalism

Wajahat Ali
Dueling Partners: an Interview with Tariq Ali on Pakistan

Robert Schwartz
A Serious Blow to the Rights of U.S. Workers: NLRB Limits Political Strikes

Alan Nasser
FDR's Response to the Plot to Overthrow Him: a Paradigm for Today's Democrats?

David Ker Thomson
The Case for Drunk Driving

Peter Morici
Gone in 30 Days: U.S. Loses 159,000 Jobs in September

William Blum
When is a Holocaust Not a Holocaust?

William S. Lind
War on Two Fronts: Without Railroads

Michael Donnelly
The Ghost of Gen. McClellan

Thom Rutledge
On Presidential "Rule"

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Science and the 2008 Presidential Elections: a Survey of the Candidates

Dave Lindorff
Calling the Problem Early

Cindy Ellen Hill
Waging a Sustainable Peace?

Paul Krassner
Dying to Get High: the Side Effects of Medical Marijuana

Daniel White
Vietnam's Masterspy

Poets' Basement
Corseri, Absher, Gibbons and Jenkins

Website of the Weekend
How We Lost Glen Canyon: a Legal Chronology

October 2, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Can a Bailout Succeed?

Joe Bageant
Speaking in the Tongues of Brokers: the Bailout in Plain English

Ralph Nader
Soulmates in Deregulation

Mike Whitney
Why the Bailout Stinks

Madis Senner
When Push Comes to Pull: How a Foreign Banker Invasion Sent the Markets Reeling

Winslow T. Wheeler
Congress as Usual:the Crisis Will Pass, But This Bunch Will Remain the Same

William Blum
A Boy's Game: the Origins of the Financial Crisis

P. Sainath
Wall Street Transforms Presidential Race

Website of the Day
McCain's Meltdown in Des Moines

October 1 , 2008

Glen Ford
The Last Hold Up

Steven Conn
Trashing Sarah Palin: the Boomerang Effect

Alan Maass / Lee Sustar
Why Not a Bailout for the Rest of Us?

Kenneth Couesbouc
The Blame Game: When Wall Street Pigs Sprout Wings

Stan Goff
How the Republicans Can Win (And Deserve It)

Adolfo Gilly
Racism, Domination and Bolivia

Rannie Amiri
Bombs in the Levant

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
The Recurring Myth of Peak Oil

Adam W. Parsons
Food and Markets

Dave Lindorff
Bums' Rush to the Bailout: Where are the Hearings?

Douglas Valentine
The Bush Continuity Plan?

Adrien Rain Burke
The Party's Over: an Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi

Website of the Day
Sarah Palin's Beauty Pageant

September 30, 2008

Pam Martens
What Wall Street Hoped to Win

Chris Floyd
The Shadow of the Pitchfork: Elite Panic on Wall Street

Stephen Martin
A Biological Walk Down Wall Street

Deepak Tripathi
A Bitter Harvest in Afghanistan

Mark Engler
Bad Money

Jonathan Cook
The Attack on Zeev Sternhell: Has Israel Become a Breeding Ground for Jewish Settler Terrorism?

Dave Lindorff
The Power of No

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Time for a General Strike?

Ahmad Faruqui
In Cold Blood: Buried Alive in Pakistan

John Chuckman
Will the Bride Wear White? As Rome Burns, Bristol Palin Prepares to Tie the Knot with Mr. "Sex on Skates"

David Macaray
Blaming the Labor Unions

Fatemeh Keshavarz
What Obama Could Have Said

Website of the Day
538: a Cognitive Map of American Politics

September 29, 2008

Mike Whitney
Black Monday

Jeff Gibbs
"Just Say No!" to Reverse Robin Hood

Paul Craig Roberts
Why America Should Listen to Ahmadinejad

Peter Morici
The Bailout and the Economy

Tim Wise
Racism as Reflex

John Walsh
Sarah Palin is a Rotten Mom

Uri Avnery
Israeli Fascism: Yes, It Can Happen Here

Alan Farago
Hell to Pay: the Financial Collapse and the Housing Market

Andy Worthington
Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials?

David Michael Green
Where's the Repudiation?

Carl Finamore
Capitalism on Steroids; Labor on Tranquilizers

Iris Keltz
Postcards from the DNC

Bill Hatch
Take This Shrimp Slayer!

Website of the Day
Tina Fey as Palin, Round Two

September 27 / 28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
How McCain Blew It

Linn Washington, Jr.
Alaska's Blacks and Palin: a Strained Relationship

Christopher Ketcham
An Israeli Trojan Horse

Mike Whitney
The People vs. the Banksters

Kevin Alexander Gray Race in the Race: Is Obama Shining Us On?

Anthony DiMaggio
The Unspoken War: Pakistan, the Media and Nuclear Weapons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Their Assets; Our Debts: How Economic Crises Are Overcome

Marc Levy /
Susan Erony
War Jokes Wanted: No Laughing Matter

Stan Cox
Livestock of Mass Destruction: Germ Labs in the Heartland

Saul Landau
Election Drizzle

Ali Khan
Meltdown in American Markets: an Islamic Perspective

David Rosen
The Great Fear: the Sexual Politics of Sarah Palin

Todd Alan Price
Bailing Out the Foes of Public Eduction

Matts Svensson
The Red and White Bird in Gaza

Ron Jacobs
Pakistan Through the Eyes of a Native Son

Robert Fantina
McCain and the Economy

Richard Rhames
Hank-ering for a Bailout

David Krieger
The U.S.-India Nuclear Proliferation Deal

Seth Sandronsky
Rethinking Charter Schools

Charles R. Larson
Dear Mrs. Abacha: a Nigerian Email Romance

Kim Nicolini
Sadism in the Desert

Poets' Basement
La Morticella, Holt, Moser and Buknatski

Website of the Day
The Great Schlep

September 26, 2008

Moshe Adler
Bailing Out Wall Street Won't Save Main Street

Bill Quigley
The U.S. War on Unarmed Working Mothers

Jonathan Cook
When Archaeology Becomes a Curse

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Visions of Pinpoint Control: the Romance of Laser Weapons

Madis Senner
Why the Bailout will Fail

Brian Cloughley
US Raids in Pakistan: Violations of Sovereignty

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Oh, Henry!

Joanne Mariner
Passport Fraud and Torture

Dan La Botz
The Financial Crisis: a View from the Left

David Macaray
Ralph's Management Indicted by Federal Grand Jury

Website of the Day
Nader and Obama Girl at the Office

September 25, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Insanity of the $700 Billion Giveaway

Sharon Smith
Democrats and Corporate Bailouts

Ralph Nader
Who Will Show Some Backbone Against the Bailout?

Christopher Ketcham
The Economy of Dead Sperm (or What I Learned From My Race-Car Grandpa Who Had No Bankers)

Eric Toussaint
Is Another Third World Debt Crisis in the Offing?

Robert Weissman
Getting Wall Street Pay Reform Right

David Estabrook
A Better Bailout Plan

Nikolas Kozloff
The Voyage of the SS Peter the Great

Steve Early
The High Price of Purple Dissent

Judith Scherr
Blue Helmets in Haiti

Laray Polk
South Ossetia and Abkhazia: Notes from the Inside

Website of the Day
Letterman Spanks McCain

September 24, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
The Bitter Fruits of Deregulation

Nikolas Kozloff
Palin at the UN: a Tutorial from Uribe

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis: How and Why Congress Should Play for Time

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Trials: Govt. Says Six Years Not Long Enough to Prepare Evidence

Steve Conn
Will Nader's Warning be Acknowledged in the Presidential Debates?

Karyn Strickler
The $700,000,000,000 Power Punch

Diane Farsetta
Stealth Marketers Gone Wild

Dennis Loo
Poisoned Legacy

John Halle
Wealth Tax Now!

Khalil Nakhleh
Palestinians Under the Occupation

Website of the Day
Nader: Debate Crasher

September 23, 2008

Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr.
Bail Out on This Bailout

Michael Hudson
Henry Paulson and the New Yazoo Land Scandal

Tariq Ali
Why was the Marriott Targeted?

Patrick Dyer
A Death Row Visit with Troy A. Davis

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah and the Palestinians

Joshua Frank
Oppose Barack Obama? How Dare Thee!

Alan Farago
Pushing the Referees: How the Financial Crisis Occurred

Dave Lindorff
The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

Tanya M. Kerssen /
Roger Burbach
Bolivia's Popular Upheaval

Harvey Wasserman
Nuclear Power Liabilities Dwarf Bush's Wall Street Bailout

Website of the Day
Hammered by the Irish: the Video

September 22, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Paulson-Bernanke Bank Bailout Plan: Will the Cure be Worse Than the Crisis?

Mike Whitney
Mushroom Clouds Over Wall Street

Christopher Ketcham
Let It Collapse!

Ron Jacobs
The Predators' Bailout

Anne-Marie McManus
Lost in the Rhetoric of Crisis

Robert Weitzel
The Twin Terrors of the Holy Land: a Sexy Fundamentalist and a White-Haired Zionist

Wajahat Ali
An Interview with Howard Dean

John Ross
A New Cold War Comes to Latin America

Steve Breyman
Does the U.S. Really Need Cluster Bombs?

Patrick Bond
On the Bellies of the Filth

Uri Avnery
Fly, Tzipora, Fly

Carl J. Mayer
An Open Letter to Michael Moore (AKA God's Pen Pal): Whatever Happened to Voting Your Conscience?

Website of the Day
Stop the Execution of Troy Anthony Davis

September 20 / 21, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Is This the Stake Through Neoliberalism's Heart?

Michael Hudson
America's Own Kleptocracy

Pam Martens
The Wall Street Model: Unintelligent Design

Lila Rajiva
Putting Lipstick on an AIG

Mike Whitney
Full-Spectrum Breakdown

Richard Rhames
A Bailout to Nowhere

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
The NY Yankees and the U.S. Economy

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Making of Recent U.S. Middle East Policies: a New Study of Neocon Influence

Susan Block
Palin as Venus in Furs: the Dominatrix Politics of Drilling and Killing

Robert Fantina
Republicans and Subpoenas: Never the Twain Shall Meet

Heidi Walters
Hung Up on Route 36: an 18-Wheeler and a Nuclear Cask

David Yearsley
Germany's Lost Organs: When Bigger Was Better

Raymond J. Lawrence
The Politics of Tribulation: Sarah Palin and the Rapture

David Rosen
One Billion Pills Later: Viagra at 10

David Michael Green
Living in Sarah Palin's America

Anthony Papa
Imprisoned Voters and the Elections

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Freddie, Fannie, Daddy, Nanny

Howard Lisnoff
When We Notice the Homeless

John Goekler
Leaving Every Child Behind

Missy Beattie
Impalement

Dave Zirin
Leave Josh Howard Alone

Charles R. Larson
Holden Caulfield, Rest in Peace

Tim Matson
Too Big for His Birches: Woodlot Economics

Susie Day
Attack of the Angry Fetus

Poets' Basement
Corseri, Gibbons, Jenkins and Ford

Website of the Weekend
Dylan & Baez: Deportees

September 19, 2008

Steven T. Banko
McCain's Passion Play

Mike Whitney
The Point of No Return

Michael Hudson
The Dow Jones' Wonderfully Cheesy Addition

William Kaufman
Shattering the Glass-Steagall Act: the Bi-Partisan Origins of the Financial Crisis

Brenda Norrell
The Fall of Lehman Bros.: Blowback for Black Mesa?

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor
The New Rhetoric of Racism: Why Won't Obama Call It Out?

Clifton Ross
Bolivia: Cleaning Up the Bull Ring

Dave Lindorff
Hang On to Your Wallets: the Government's About to Rescue Us!

Cynthia McKinney
Seize the Time!

Susan Hurlich
Storm Survivors: a Dispatch from Cuba

Michael Donnelly
Let's Hand It All Over to the Democrats (They Helped Create This Mess)

Website of the Day
The Crisis Explained

September 18, 2008

Benjamin Dangl
The Machine Gun and the Meeting Table

Harvey Wasserman
The Senate's Drill, Drill, Drill Scam

Susan Abulhawa
The Lobby Has Spoken: Biden and Israel

Robert Weissman
After the Fall: the Financial Re-Regulatory Agenda

Anne-Marie McManus
McCain's Cinderella: the Fetishization of Sarah Palin

Corey D. B. Walker
The Poverty of 21st Century Progressivism

William S. Lind
Senator O'Bush: Why Obama is Wrong on Iran and Afghanistan

Ron Jacobs
Washington's False Logic of Torture

Dave Lindorff
American and China: Joined at the Hip

Binoy Kampmark
How Damien Hirst Got Away With It

Website of the Day
An Invisible Army

September 17, 2008

Stephen Conn
Palin and the Politics of Big Oil

Forrest Hylton
Reactionary Rampage in Bolivia

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus Leaves Iraq

Gregory Elich
Inside North Korea

Ralph Nader
How the U.S. Auto Industry Wrecked Itself

Franklin Lamb
The Palestinians of Shabra-Shatila

Pam Martens
The Gang's All Here: Bush, McCain and the Old Iran/Contra Team

Dave Lindorff
The End of the Blue Chip Economy

Peter Morici
The Damage Deepens

Stanley Heller
The Killing of Count Folke Bernadotte

Douglas Valentine
Rambling David Foster Wallace

Website of the Day
Free Cindy McCain!

September 16, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling from Direct Hits

Tiphaine Dickson
Citizen Palin: Why Sarah Palin Quoted Westbrook Pegler

Stan Goff
America is Now Rome: an Open Letter to Christian Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

Uri Avnery
Tzipi's Choice

Michael Winship
Lipstick on Polar Bears

Jeff Halper
Warehousing Palestinians

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia Versus the Empire

Oscar Gonzalez
Who's Dumber? Ike's Refugees or Wall Street's?

Binoy Kampmark
Cheney and His Records

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Muslims are at Peace with You

Sen. Russ Feingold
Restoring the Rule of Law

Website of the Day
The Next Great Rock Band?

September 15, 2008

Mike Whitney
The Tumbrils Roll at Dawn

Peter Morici
Toxic Lehman

Patrick Cockburn
Take Another Look at the Surge

Charles R. Larson
The Maverick Has No Clothes

Jonathan Cook
The Expulsion of Palestinians from Jaffa

Nikolas Kozloff
Racist Rhetoric in Bolivia

Roger Burbach
Morales Confronts the Insurrection: Bolivia and the Echoes of Allende

Helen Redmond
Where's the Health Care Bailout?

David Michael Green
The Democrats Do Poland

David Macaray
The Boeing Strike

Ralph Nader
Remembering Peter Camejo

Website of the Day
The Ballad of Sarah Palin

October 9, 2008

From Guantánamo to the United States

The Ordeal of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

In an extraordinary and unprecedented ruling in a US District Court, Judge Ricardo Urbina has ruled that 17 wrongly imprisoned Chinese Muslims at Guantánamo must be allowed entry to the United States. It is, as the media has been reporting, the first time that a US court has directly ordered the release of a prisoner at Guantánamo, and the first time that a foreign national held at the prison has been ordered to be brought to the United States. It is also a resounding blow to the administration’s claims that it can seize anyone it wishes as an “enemy combatant,” and hold them indefinitely, even if there is no evidence whatsoever to support their detention.

The road to Guantánamo

The 17 men -- Uighurs (or Uyghurs) from Xinjiang province in the People’s Republic of China (known to the Uighurs as East Turkestan) -- have been a problem for the authorities since they were captured nearly seven years ago. Refugees from Chinese oppression, 13 of the men had, by accident or design, made their way to a run-down hamlet in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains, where they spent their time making the place habitable, and indulging in futile dreams of rising up against their historic oppressors. After the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, they were targeted in a US bombing raid, in which several of their companions died. The survivors made their way to the Pakistani border, where they were welcomed by villagers, who betrayed them soon after, selling them for a bounty to US forces.

The other four Uighurs were caught up in similarly bleak scenarios. One had fled from death and destruction in Kabul, and was caught as he attempted to cross the Pakistani border, and three were randomly seized in northern Afghanistan and imprisoned with several hundred foreign Taliban fighters in Qala-i-Janghi, a fort run by General Rashid Dostum, one of the leaders of the Northern Alliance. When Alliance troops, with support from US and British Special Forces, began tying the men’s hands behind their backs, some of the Taliban soldiers thought that they were about to be executed, and rose up against their captors. In the ensuing massacre -- involving ground troops and bombing raids -- the majority of the prisoners were killed, but the Uighurs, along with 84 others, had stayed in the basement, where they survived death by bombing, fire and flooding, and they were part of a group of around 50 survivors who were eventually transferred to Guantánamo.

According to Chris Mackey, the pseudonym of a senior interrogator at the US-run prisons in Kandahar and Bagram, which were used to process the prisoners for Guantánamo, US forces realized almost immediately that the men were not involved with al-Qaeda, but decided to hold them for their supposed intelligence value. In his book The Interrogators, Mackey explained that their arrival triggered a frenzy of activity in the upper echelons of the administration. “The requests for follow-up questions flooded in from Washington,” he wrote, “and every query that came in made it clear that US intelligence was starting from practically zero with this group.”

Twisted tribunals

Transferred to Guantánamo, so that the authorities could continue milking them for information about China, the US authorities nevertheless persisted in identifying the men with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, by claiming that they were associated with the East Turkestan Independence Movement (ETIM), a Uighur resistance group. And when the administration sought support from China for its invasion of Iraq -- or, at least, a lack of opposition -- it obligingly designated ETIM a terrorist organization, and allowed Chinese interrogators to visit Guantánamo, where, according to several of the prisoners, they received threats that they would be killed if they ever returned to China.

In 2004, when the Supreme Court ruled that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights (in other words, the right to challenge the basis of their detention in a federal court), the administration’s cynical response was to introduce military review boards at Guantánamo -- the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) -- to assess whether, on capture, the prisoners had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants,” who could be held without charge or trial. This was a hideously unjust process, as the prisoners were not allowed legal representation, were confronted with often spurious allegations (frequently produced through the torture or coercive interrogations of other prisoners), and were also prevented from either seeing or hearing the “classified evidence” against them, which could also have been produced in the same unjust, unprincipled, and often illegal manner.

Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence who worked on the tribunals, caused a stir last year when he explained how the information used in the tribunals frequently consisted of intelligence “of a generalized nature -- often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status,” and how the entire process was, essentially, designed to rubber-stamp the prisoners’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.” As a result, only 38 of the 558 prisoners were cleared for release after the tribunals, and on a few occasions, when the result of the tribunal displeased the administration, further tribunals were held until the desired result was achieved.

This happened to at least two of the Uighurs, Anwar Hassan and Hammad Mohammed, but others were among the lucky 38 who were found to be “No Longer Enemy Combatants” after the CSRTs, and five of these men were finally released in May 2006, when Albania stepped forward as the only country in the world prepared to risk the wrath of China by giving the men a new home -- albeit one with no Uighur community, no work prospects, and no chance for them ever to be reunited with their families.

While these men struggled to survive in Albania, the other Uighurs -- who were all eventually cleared for release after further review boards -- remained in severe isolation in Guantanamo. Like the majority of other cleared prisoners from human rights-abusing regimes (including Algeria, Libya, Tunisia and Uzbekistan), few of the men were held in Camp 4, the only block that allowed the prisoners to share dorm-like facilities, and the majority continued to be held in maximum security cellblocks for 22 or 23 hours a day, prohibited from meeting each other and with little, if any outside stimulation to break the corrosive monotony of their existence, or their fears that they would never be released or would, in fact, be surreptitiously returned to China.

In March, a letter from Guantánamo by one of the prisoners, Abdulghappar, described the suffering of the men in painful detail. He wrote: “Being away from family, away from our homeland, and also away from the outside world and losing any contact with anyone is not suitable for a human being, as, also, is being forbidden from experiencing natural sunlight and natural air, and being surrounded by a metal box on all sides.” He also reported that one of his compatriots had embarked on a hunger strike in protest, but was being punished for it, and asked, “In the US Constitution, is it a crime for someone to ask to protect his health and to ask for his rights? If it does count as a crime, then what is the difference between the US Constitution and the Communist Constitution?”

Empty evidence

This impasse over the Uighurs’ plight was finally broken in June, after the Supreme Court, dismayed that the habeas rights it had granted the prisoners in 2004 had been removed in subsequent legislation, stamped its authority by ruling that the prisoners had constitutional habeas rights. This unblocked a queue of contested habeas cases that had been on hold pending the Supreme Court’s ruling, and when the first of the cases, Parhat v. Gates, reached the Court of Appeals in Washington, the judges’ explosive ruling led directly to Judge Urbina’s historic ruling on Tuesday.

The three Appeal Court judges -- noticeably, two Conservatives and a Liberal -- ruled that the CSRT’s decision that Huzaifa Parhat, one of the Uighurs, was an “enemy combatant” was “invalid,” and “directed the government to release or transfer” him (or to hold a new tribunal “consistent with the Court’s opinion”). In a savage denunciation of the CSRT decision, they lambasted the government for the flimsy and unsubstantiated allegations and associations it used to conclude that Parhat was an “enemy combatant,” and in a memorable passage compared the government’s argument that its evidence was reliable because it was mentioned in three different classified documents to a line from a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. As Chief Judge Merrick B. Garland explained, “Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact the government has ’said it thrice’ does not make an allegation true.”

With the Parhat ruling, the government’s attempts to insist that any of the Uighurs were “enemy combatants” were clearly no longer tenable. At a hearing in August, when the idea was first floated that they should be released into the United States, Judge Urbina “hinted,” as the Washington Post described it, “that he was intrigued by the detainees’ proposal,” and stated, “I don’t understand why that would not be a viable option.”

The Justice Department did not respond directly to Judge Urbina’s comments, but its lawyers argued in court that only the President had the authority to allow the men into the United States. However, the Post explained that, although the issues were “complex,” legal scholars “generally disagreed with the government’s position, saying the judge has the ultimate authority” to decide whether to bring the men to the US mainland.

The Justice Department also insisted that the judge was legally prevented from ordering the Uighurs’ entry into the US if they had ties to terrorist groups. As Parhat v. Gates showed, however, neither Huzaifa Parhat nor, by extension, the other 12 men seized with him had ties to terrorist groups, and as the weeks passed the government fatally undermined its own arguments: first it announced, in belated response to the Parhat ruling, that it would not arrange a new trial for Parhat and that it would “serve no purpose” to continue trying to prove that he was an “enemy combatant”; then it did the same for four of his compatriots; and on September 30 it added the last 12 Uighurs to its list of non-combatants.

Welcome to America

As a result, Judge Urbina came to work on Tuesday facing a stark but simple decision: to obey the US Constitution or to turn his back on all he had been brought up to believe in.

He chose to obey the Constitution. Ordering the 17 men to be brought from Guantánamo to the courtroom on Friday, he indicated that he would release them to supporters in the United States -- in Florida, and in the Washington D.C. area -- who would look after them while the government worked out if it could come up with another solution that did not involve their continued imprisonment.

“I think the moment has arrived for the court to shine the light of constitutionality on the reasons for detention,” Judge Urbina stated, adding, “Because the Constitution prohibits indefinite detentions without cause, the continued detention is unlawful.”

He also explained, as the New York Times described it, that “the men had never fought the United States and were not a security threat,” and impatiently rejected a government request to stay his order to permit an immediate appeal. “All of this means more delay,” he said, “and delay is the name of the game up until this point.” Drawing on the historic right of a judge to demand that a prisoner be brought before him (the core, in fact, of habeas corpus, which means, literally, “you have the body”), he added, “I want to see the individuals.”

When the government suggested that immigration officials might detain the men on arrival in the United States, Judge Urbina snapped, “I do not expect these Uighurs will be molested by any member of the United States government. I’m a federal judge, and I’ve issued an order.” Crucially, as the Times put it, he “underscored the significance of his ruling with repeated references to the constitutional separation of powers and the judiciary’s role,” rejecting arguments put forward by the Justice Department as “assertions of executive power to detain people indefinitely without court review,” which, he said, were “not in keeping with our system of government.”

As the judge rose to leave the bench, the crowded courtroom burst into applause. Members of the Washington D.C. Uighur community, who settled here in the 1980s, when they fled Chinese oppression and were regarded as anti-Communist heroes, had come to lend support, and their offers of help -- and those offered by community leaders from Tallahassee, Florida, who have also been involved in plans to welcome the Uighurs -- were credited with helping the judge make his decision.

Nury Turkel, a D.C.-based aviation lawyer, explained, “Our community said, 'We are here to help. Release them into our custody.' We have people offering them places to stay, English training, employment. We don't want anyone to think they will be a burden on society.”

Although the government immediately pledged that it would appeal Judge Urbina’s ruling, and the White House’s press secretary, Dana Perino, claimed, somewhat hysterically, that it “could be used as precedent for other detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, including sworn enemies of the United States suspected of planning the attacks of 9/11, who may also seek release into our country,” no decision had been made by the close of business on Wednesday.

As CNN reported, the government had filed an emergency motion, reiterating its argument that “only the executive branch, not the courts, may decide whether to admit an alien into the United States,” and insisting that Judge Urbina’s ruling “threatens serious harm to the interests of the United States and its citizens by mandating that the government release in the nation's capital 17 individuals who engaged in weapons training at a military training camp.” In response, as the Associated Press reported, the prisoners stated that Judge Urbina had “made the right decision in ordering their release since they are no longer considered enemy combatants,” and their lawyers argued that delaying their release would mean that “the government would prolong by months, and perhaps years, an imprisonment whose legal justification it has conceded away.”

In the hope that justice will prevail, I leave the final word -- for now -- to Sabin Willett, a Boston-based lawyer who represents some of the Uighur prisoners. Willett and his colleagues have campaigned assiduously for their clients, and after arguing the case before Judge Urbina, he stated, with a dignity sorely lacking from the government’s rhetoric, “In the history of our Republic, the military never imprisoned any man so harshly, and for so long, let alone men who are not the enemy. We have broken faith with the rule of law, and been untrue to the generosity of spirit that is our national character.”

Note: Early on the morning of October 9, Reuters reported that a federal appeals court temporarily blocked the Uighurs’ release, granting the government a stay until October 16, in order to give the court more time to consider the dispute. The three judges added, however, that the stay “should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits” of the government's request.

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the author of 'The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (published by Pluto Press). Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk He can be reached at: andy@andyworthington.co.uk

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont