Uighur Detainees May Be Released to U.S.

"You can't hold people just because it's politically expedient," one of the lawyers, Susan Baker Manning, said in an interview.

The Justice Department declined to comment. But its lawyers have argued in court papers and at hearings that only the president has the authority to allow the men into the country. They also said the judge is barred from ordering their entry if they have ties to terrorist groups.

In court documents, they have contended that one of the men received training from a group that was later determined by the Bush administration to be a terrorist organization. The Justice Department is expected to make the same argument for the other 16 Uighurs, an official said.

"It's an executive branch matter, and not for some technical reason," Judry Subar, a Justice Department lawyer, said at the August hearing. "It's because that goes -- particularly in a case like this -- to very serious, important and sensitive diplomatic . . . considerations."

Legal scholars said the issues are complex, but they generally disagreed with the government's position, saying the judge has the ultimate authority to decide whether he should release the Uighurs.

"It boils down to: either you keep these people in prison at Guantanamo Bay for the rest of their lives or you release them into the United States," said Donald E. Wilkes Jr., a professor at the University of Georgia Law School and an authority on habeas corpus rights. "If the court decides that imprisoning these people indefinitely is out, that it is unconstitutional, then there is no question in my mind that the court can order these people released into the United States."

The Uighurs are natives of northwestern China who have been demanding an independent homeland. Chinese authorities consider them separatists. Over the years, some have sought military training in other countries.

In 2001, most of the Uighurs now in Guantanamo Bay were living in camps in Afghanistan until U.S. airstrikes drove them into neighboring Pakistan. They were captured there and turned over to U.S. authorities.

The government has asserted that the Uighurs were members of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement and trained at camps affiliated with the Taliban or al-Qaeda. The Bush administration designated ETIM a terrorist organization in August 2002, after the Uighurs were taken into custody.

The Uighurs' attorneys have said the men never took up arms against the United States. And the Uighurs have told military court officials that they are sympathetic to the United States.

The government suffered a major setback in June when a federal appeals court found the evidence against one Uighur to be so weak that it compared the government's legal theories to a nonsensical 19th-century poem, Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark." The court ordered the man, Huzaifa Parhat, released, transferred or offered a new military hearing.

The government chose not to retry Parhat and announced it would no longer treat him as an enemy combatant. It subsequently did the same for four others and added the final 12 on Tuesday.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.