The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a long-shot appeal filed on behalf of two Chinese Muslims being held at Guantanamo Bay while the U.S. government tries to find a country to take them.
The men's plight has posed a dilemma for courts and a public relations problem for the Bush administration.
A federal judge said the detention of the ethnic Uighurs at the military prison in Cuba was unlawful but there was nothing courts could do. Without comment, the justices declined to consider an unusual direct appeal of that decision.
The military agrees that Abu Bakker Qassim and A'Del Abdu al-Hakim should be freed after more than four years in U.S. custody. But with concerns they would be persecuted back in China, where?
"We don't want to put them on a boat and shove them offshore," said Robert Turner, a former high-level State Department official in the Reagan administration who teaches at the University of Virginia.
The men were captured in 2001 in Pakistan, and the following year the U.S. military shipped them to Guantanamo Bay along with hundreds of other suspected terrorists.
The military decided that the two men and 36 others -- out of more than 550 prisoners -- were not enemy combatants. The standard procedure is to send those people home. But Qassim and al-Hakim could not be returned to China after last year's vindication because the United States suspects they would be tortured or killed.
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