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Guantanamo detainee Huzaifa Parhat had been improperly classified as an enemy combatant, thus giving him the chance to win his release. The appeals court ordered the government to release Parhat, or to hold a new tribunal hearing, consistent with the court’s opinion. They also gave Parhat’s lawyers permission to file a habeas corpus petition in the federal district court, as a consequence of the Supreme Court’s recent decision.
    President Bush almost hit the Oval Office ceiling.
    Because right here, in the capital city of the United States, it had been decided that foreign bombers and murderers who had illegally attacked, harmed, and killed U.S. troops on active service, were now to be granted the same rights as peaceful, law-abiding, tax-paying U.S. citizens. Abdul, the blood-thirsty, vengeful, foreign jihadist was regarded as the equal of a U.S. college professor or businessman.
    Yousaf and his boys each had one leg over the Guantanamo razor-wire, so to speak.
    Deep inside the Pentagon, the service chiefs were appalled. E-mails flashed between the White House and the office of the secretary for defense. Across the bridge at Langley, Virginia, the recently appointed head of the CIA, Bob Birmingham, was speaking on a secure line to the chairman of the joint chiefs. The chief of naval operations was on the wire to the new director of the National Security Agency, Captain James Ramshawe. The question being asked in several different forms amounted to the same one: “What the hell are we supposed to do when some damn-fool justice lets these crazy bastards loose?”
    Guantanamo’s vital statistics were well known to the entire military Intelligence community. Of the 779 suspected terrorists detained in the prison since it first opened, 248 remained. Of these, some fifty had been cleared for release but faced prosecution in their own countries. A further fifty were still being interrogated, and of those, twenty would definitely be charged with a criminal offense.
    Estimates were that Guantanamo held perhaps fifty hugely dangerous characters, and of these, fourteen were judged by the authorities to be lethal, and ought not be released ever. All of the principal security chiefs of the United States, both military and civilian, had a copy of that final list.
Of the fourteen, four were not identified by name—just by prison number and a short note detailing the circumstances of arrest.
    The missing names were Yousaf Mohammed, Ibrahim Sharif, Ben al-Turabi, and Abu Hassan Akbar. The latter two were believed to be former Palestinian “freedom fighters.”
    Bob Birmingham, who stood six-foot-six, could scarcely believe what had happened. The U.S. justice system was plainly going to be hit by a barrage of lawyers demanding the writ of habeas corpus for their incarcerated clients. Each one of these suspected foreign cutthroats/murderers had precisely the same rights as he did, one of them being the right to be heard in an American court of law.
    Bob paced his office. Okay, so a U.S. judge frees these four fanatics—what then? They have no passports, papers, or credit cards. No money, no residences in the United States. What happens now? Do we just release them outside the courtroom? Tell them to get on a bus and then get lost? We can’t put them on a civilian aircraft without proper security guards, and we can’t send them anywhere without informing that foreign government. Equally, we cannot lose them. Neither can we take action against them.
    “Jesus Christ,” said Bob. And the big CIA boss knew as well as anyone that in all these cases against suspected terrorists, the advantage rested with the petitioners, not with the U.S. military lawyers who would argue against setting them free. Right now, no one could do much except wait for the appeals to come in from Washington attorneys, who would surely be retained by the al-Qaeda paymasters in faraway Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia.
    “Goddamned lawyers,” he muttered.