In the recent SCOTUS decision the prisoner was actually a Bosnian arrested by Bosnian police in Bosnia and handed over to the U.S.
The question imo isn't whether he is an ordinary criminal, it is whether he is a criminal at all. That cannot be decided because the U.S. will not charge him with a crime, will not allow him a trial, will not allow him a lawyer, will not allow him to even appear before a federal judge and ask "Why the heck have I been imprisoned for so many years?"
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Lakhdar Boumediene, now 41, travelled to Bosnia with five other Algerian men during the civil war in the 1990s, and may have fought with Bosnian forces against the Serbs.
The six stayed in Bosnia, married Bosnian women, were granted citizenship and took jobs working with orphans for various Muslim charities.
In October 2001, the US embassy in Sarajevo asked the Bosnian government to arrest them because of a suspicion they had been involved in a plot to bomb the embassy.
The six men were duly arrested. But after a three-month investigation, in which the Bosnian police searched their apartments, their computers and their documents, there was - according to a report by the New-York-based Center for Constitutional Rights - still no evidence to justify the arrests.
Bosnia's Supreme Court ordered their release, and the Bosnian Human Rights Chamber ruled they had the right to remain in the country and were not to be deported.
However, on the night of 17 January 2002, after they were freed from Bosnian custody, they were seized and rendered to Guantanamo.
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