US judge: five Algerians at Guantanamo can be freed
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By James Vicini
WASHINGTON, Nov 20 (Reuters) - Five of six Algerians must be released after nearly seven years of captivity at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, a federal judge ruled on Thursday in a setback for the Bush administration,
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled from the bench after holding the first hearings under a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June that gave Guantanamo prisoners the legal right to challenge their continued confinement.
U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to close the prison camp after he takes office in January. Meanwhile, U.S. judges in Washington are moving ahead with case-by-case reviews of detainee legal challenges.
Leon, reading his ruling as the detainees listened in Guantanamo via a telephone hookup, said the U.S. government had failed to show that the five detainees had planned to travel to Afghanistan to fight against U.S. forces.
He ordered the U.S. government to take all necessary and diplomatic steps to facilitate the release of the five "forthwith."
There are about 255 detainees at Guantanamo, which was set up in January 2002 to hold terrorism suspects captured after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States by al Qaeda militants. Most have been held for years without being charged and many have complained of abuse.
The Algerians, former residents of Bosnia, were picked up by Bosnian authorities in October 2001 and were sent in January of 2002 to Guantanamo, where they have been held as "enemy combatants" without being charged.
After they were detained in 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush said the six men had been planning a bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo.
But last month, Justice Department attorneys said they were no longer relying on those accusations to justify the continued detention of the six men.
The U.S. government has said the six Algerians planned to go to Afghanistan to fight U.S. forces. But Leon said that allegation was based on a single source, and he did not have enough information to judge the source's reliability or credibility.
The judge ruled the government did provide enough evidence that one of the detainees, Belkacem Bensayah, had planned to take up arms against the United States in Afghanistan. (Editing by Kristin Roberts)
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