Youngest prisoner may be released from Guantanamo

After a federal judge said earlier this month that the government’s case for holding the detainee, Mohammed Jawad, was “riddled with holes,” the Obama administration conceded defeat and agreed that Mr. Jawad would no longer be considered a military detainee. But the administration said it would still hold him at the prison in Cuba for possible prosecution in the United States.

On Tuesday, Mr. Jawad’s lawyers attacked that position, arguing that the government had given up any authority to hold him. “Enough is enough,” the lawyers said in legal papers that urged the judge, Ellen Segal Huvelle, to send him back to Afghanistan, which has requested his return.

Within hours, the judge scheduled a hearing for Thursday morning in Federal District Court in Washington, setting up what could be a pivotal battle over the reach of the Supreme Court’s ruling last year that granted Guantánamo detainees the right to contest their imprisonments in habeas corpus suits.

Richard H. Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University, said the case could be “the ultimate confrontation” in the courts over Guantánamo.

Mr. Pildes noted that after long battles over whether detainees could use the centuries-old habeas corpus principle that prisoners can challenge their detention, the Supreme Court decision provided few guidelines for the courts.