Uighurs without a country

THE FEDERAL judiciary still has at least some independent souls. One of them, US District Judge Ricardo Urbina, last week instructed the Bush administration to release 17 Guantanamo prisoners to freedom in the United States, after the government could provide no evidence the inmates had ever presented a security threat to this country. Unfortunately, a rattled Justice Department immediately got a stay of Urbina's order from an appeals court.

The 17 are Uighurs - Muslims from a western province of China that has long sought greater autonomy from Beijing. They had been in Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border during the US war against Afghanistan in 2002, and were taken into custody at a time when US officials were paying $5,000 bounties for suspected terrorists.

The government has long since given up any pretense that the Uighurs (pronounced wee-gurs) had fought against US forces. But Washington knows it would be wrong to hand them over to likely imprisonment, or worse, in China. The administration has tried to prevail on other countries to take the Uighurs. None has agreed to, however, both because of administration rhetoric about Gitmo inmates being the "worst of the worst" and because other countries do not want to incur China's wrath.

Those obstacles notwithstanding, it's always a shame when the US judiciary treats basic rights, such as habeas corpus, the way Massachusetts drivers treat "yield" signs. There is no good reason to hold the 17 any longer. Seventeen Uighur-American families living in the Washington area have agreed to be sponsors of the prisoners once they are released.

Every additional day they spend at Guantanamo makes a mockery of the rule of law in the United States.