The Supreme Court this week declined to hear appeals from seven of the 169 men being held in the military prison at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The decision comes four years after the court’s controversial ruling in Boumediene v. Bush, which established that detainees have the right to challenge their confinement in a U.S. court. The 2008 decision left the details to lower courts, which have, in multiple cases, sided with the detainees, but were then overruled by the conservative Court of Appeals in D.C. To date, the U.S. government has released about 600 detainees to their native countries or to other countries willing to take them.
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