In the inevitable sequel to the Supreme Court’s outrageous Boumediene decision extending habeas corpus rights to Guanatanamo detainees, federal judge Richard Urbina has ordered the government to produce 17 Uighur jihadis who were captured while training at terrorist camps in Afghanistan.
If Judge Urbina has his way, the Uighur jihadis may be coming soon to Washington neighborhoods where there are Uighur families waiting to take them in. The government has apparently found no country willing to take the Uighur jihadis off its hands.
As is its habit in such matters, the New York Times salutes Judge Urbina’s ruling as “a sharp setback for the administration[.]” (The administration has announced it will appeal.) I can think of more apt ways to describe the ruling, as might the residents of the neighborhoods that are to receive the Uighur jihadis, among others.
As I noted in “Anti-terror oops,” Barack Obama is a big fan of the Boumediene decision. As he explained (inaccurately) earlier this year:
“I mean, you remember during the Nuremberg trials, part of what made us different was even after these Nazis had performed atrocities that no one had ever seen before, we still gave them a day in court and that taught the entire world about who we are, but also the basic principles of rule of law. Now the Supreme Court upheld that principle.”
Unfortunately, however, the story doesn’t end with the Supreme Court decision. Now what?
Via Hugh Hewitt (guest post by Beldar).
JOHN adds: Reporting on this controversy has been almost uniformly incoherent. Most accounts don’t make it clear what is going on here: the Uighur jihadis were being trained to carry out terrorist attacks, but not here in the U.S.; rather, in their native China. Ordinarily we would have repatriated them to China, but if they go there, the Chinese will kill them. So for humanitarian reasons, we haven’t sent them home. Understandably, no other country is interested in housing these jihadis. Now a federal judge says that we must turn them loose here in the U.S., as though they were asylum seekers rather than captured terrorists.
UPDATE: A federal appellate court panel has blocked release of these would-be terrorists until the court has considered the appeal.
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