In a third straight win for the Obama administration, a federal judge has upheld the Guantánamo detention of a Yemeni captive whose brother is also held indefinitely without charges at the Pentagon's prison camps in southeast Cuba.
U.S. District Court Reggie Walton ruled Sept. 22, in a decision made public last week that Toffiq al Bihani, 38, never truly broke with al Qaeda even though he was a terror training camp washout.
The decision, in the same month as two other federal judges upheld the detentions of Kuwaiti and Afghan detainees, left the scorecard at 18-38. That means judges have ruled for release of Guantánamo detainees two-thirds of the time since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008 empowered Guantánamo captives to file petitions of habeas corpus, the mechanism by which a civilian judge gets to review the Pentagon's and president's reason for holding the war prisoners indefinitely.
Dozens more petitions are in the pipeline and experts disagree on whether a trend is emerging on how the judges are analyzing the cases.
Bihani's lawyer George Clarke said the judges have steadily moved toward a standard of what the captive intended -- not what he did -- to justify indefinite detention.
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