5 Detainees Ordered Released From Guantanamo : NPR - 0 views
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A federal judge ordered the release of five Bosnian citizens Thursday who have been held for seven years at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
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This was the first ruling since the Supreme Court declared in June that detainees at Guantanamo have a right under the U.S. Constitution to challenge the basis for their indefinite detention.
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the system set up by the Bush administration — and ratified by Congress — was fraught with the risk of error because the detainees had no right to counsel, no meaningful way of knowing what the allegations against them were, and no chance to rebut evidence against them.
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The cases ruled on Thursday were the first to provide all of those safeguards, and in five of the six cases, Leon concluded there simply was no corroborated evidence against the men and that indeed, the sole basis for their detention was a single uncorroborated piece of raw intelligence.
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"There was a lot of eye-wiping and handkerchief-reaching; it was very emotional," Waxman said. "I mean these guys have been held for seven years following their detention investigation in Sarajevo."
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Thursday's ruling will likely be seen as a signal to other judges to be skeptical of the government representations.
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"Our soldiers working with the Bosnian government see terrorists who are plotting to bomb our embassy," Bush said at the time. The government, however, later abandoned this claim and moved on to a number of other claims, which similarly were later withdrawn when they could not be substantiated.