Famous Gitmo Detainee Released to France

Lakhdar Boumediene, the Guantanamo detainee who took on the Bush administration in a landmark Supreme Court case, was released today and flown to France to be reunited with relatives, the Washington Post reports. He was named the plaintiff in Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court case that extended the right to habeas corpus to detainees. Though he’s not a French citizen, France agreed to accept the 43-year-old because he has family there.

Boumediene has been on a hunger strike since 2006 to protest his incarceration, with authorities force-feeding him to keep him alive. He was arrested along with five compatriots in Bosnia in 2001, but in November a federal judge said the evidence against them wasn’t credible, and ordered all but one released. (More Boumediene v. Bush stories.)