A federal judge ruled yesterday that 17 Chinese Muslims, known as Uighurs, that are detained at Guantanamo Bay clearly aren’t terrorists and should be set free. But as the Wall Street Journal’s Jess Bravin reports, the Justice Dept. immediately sprang to its feet and blasted the decision as “unprecedented." Justice argued that it “presents serious national security and separation-of-powers concerns.”

But the truth is that the U.S. would have released the 17 Uighers if they had found a country that would have taken them. Also, the decision looks to be a logical follow-up to the June Supreme Court ruling that gave Gitmo detainees habeas corpus rights.

Luckily for the Uighers they will no longer be made an example in the administration’s thirst for executive power. The freed detainees will stay in a Chinese Muslim community in Washington.-MB

The passing of the $700 bailout bill into law hasn’t exactly turned things around on Wall Street. So with the Dow Jones industrial average plummeting, Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, announced today that interest rates will be cut by half a percentage point.

The New York Times’ Keith Bradsher, Edmund Andrews and David Jolly report that the move was coordinated with rate cuts by the European Central Bank and other banks around the world. A U.S. economist is quoted as writing “at last a coordinated show of force…the move is to be applauded.” But can this post-post mortem move stave off a recession?-MB

For a while there in August, Understanding Government was monitoring the heated dispute between U.S. military commanders and the Afghanistan government over the death toll of a U.S. air strike into Azizabad, Afghanistan. The U.S. military claimed that five civilians had died from the attack and 30 militants. But the Afghan govt.—and the United Nations—claimed the figure was actually 90 civilian deaths and few militant casualties.

The New York Times’ Eric Schmitt reports that U.S. military investigators have now revised that number to 30 civilian deaths and concur with few militants conclusion. The report, though,—which was ordered by David McKiernan, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan—is still far off the estimate by Afghanistan and the U.N. It also may contradict the New York Times’ itself, which reported cell phone pictures of mass graves after the attacks.

In other words, instead of putting an end to a complex tragedy that has enraged the Afghanistan govt., the military report may have furthered the confusion.-MB

The Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow reports on one pretty interesting section in the bailout bill: the Treasury Dept. does not have to follow standard govt. contracting rules in outsourcing management of the bailout. Basically the Treasury Dept. will be looking outside the agency for financial consultants to manage the purchase of billions of troubled mortgage assets.

Treasury claims it’s an emergency and they need this flexibility. But as O’Harrow points out some of the culprits in the crisis of the secondary mortgage market could be soon guiding the govt’s bailout. Also, didn’t the govt. fail when it ignored contracting rules for the last national emergencies– Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War?