Friday, December 19, 2008
Scripps Howard: More than seven years after their detention at the request of U.S. authorities and nearly six years since their arrival at the Guantanamo Bay prison, three Algerian-born Bosnians are back home. It took that long, and a Supreme Court ruling in June, to get their case before a federal judge.
Soon after their incarceration, President Bush said they had been plotting to blow up the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo. Somehow that charge was dropped along the way and three others detained at the same time were accused of planning to travel to Afghanistan to fight U.S. forces.
Source’s credibility
Judge Richard Leon, a Bush appointee, ruled that the Bush administration had failed to prove that claim, based on a single unnamed source of indeterminate credibility, and, in a judicial first for the Guantanamo prisoners, ordered five of them released immediately.
Granted, there are special legal circumstances surrounding the detainees and their guilt or innocence, but it should not have taken six years in legal limbo to get them before a judge.