Despite being cleared for release, they are still at Guantanamo because the Government argues no country will take them. The Times reports that at Tuesday's hearing, their lawyers will ask they be released into the United States:

On Tuesday, a federal district judge, Ricardo M. Urbina, is to hear an urgent claim by lawyers for the Uighurs, that they should be released immediately into the United States since they are no longer considered enemy combatants.

The government argues that they should be held at Guantánamo until another country can be found to accept them. In filings, the Justice Department lawyers make expansive arguments that, while Judge Urbina can hear the Uighurs’ case, he cannot order their release. The judiciary “simply has no authority” to release the Uighurs into the United States, one filing said.

The Justice Department said the government’s executive branch, not the judicial branch, has the authority to conclude military detentions, as it has in prior wars. It noted that in World War II “no court ever questioned that it was solely for the political branches — not the courts” to decide how Italian prisoners of war were handled.

That's the only argument the Government has, and I hope it doesn't work. In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled in Zadvydas v. INS :

A statute permitting indefinite detention of an alien raises a serious constitutional problem. The Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause forbids the government to deprive any person of liberty without due process of law. Freedom from imprisonment -- from government custody, detention, or other forms of physical restraint -- lies at the heart of the liberty that Clause protects. Government detention violates that Clause unless the detention is ordered in a criminal proceeding with adequate procedural protections, or, in certain special and narrow non-punitive circumstances, where a special justification, such as harm-threatening mental illness, outweighs the individual's constitutionally protected interest in avoiding physical restraint.

The Court also ruled in that case:

But once an alien enters the country, the legal circumstance changes, for the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause applies to all "persons" within the United States, including aliens, whether their presence in the United States is lawful, unlawful, temporary, or permanent.

As I wrote here in 2006:

In other words, the Due Process clause applies to citizens, aliens and undocumented residents , whether here lawfully or unlawfully- so long as they are physically present within the country.

The Chinese are at Guantanamo. They have been determined not to be enemy combatants and to be innocent of wrongdoing. They had been sold by bounty hunters to the U.S. They want to stay in the United States. No other country will take them.

The Court continues: "Once removal of a deportable alien is no longer reasonably foreseeable, continued detention is no longer authorized."

In other words, they should be granted asylum.

It's bad enough that we detain those suspected of terrorism for four years without charges or lawyers. But to detain the innocent? Bush has stooped to a new low with this case.

It's been six years now. Enough. Release the Uighur detainees.