The Obama administration filed a petition with the Supreme Court on Friday asking the Court to block the 17 Chinese Uighurs detained at Guantanamo from entering the United States — this, despite a court ruling last year ordering their release. The petition argues that the Uighurs “have already obtained relief” and that the government had no legal obligation to settle them in the U.S.:

Petitioners have already obtained relief. They are no longer being detained as enemy combatants, they are free to leave Guantanamo Bay to go to any country that is willing to accept them, and in the meantime, they are housed in facilities separate from those for enemy combatants under the least restrictive conditions practicable. Moreover, the government is actively seeking to resettle petitioners, and the President has ordered the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility by January 22, 2010. [...]

Petitioners’ continued presence at Guantanamo Bay is not unlawful detention, but rather the consequence of their lawful exclusion from the United States, under the constitutional exercise of authority by the political Branches, coupled with the unavailability of another country willing to accept them. Because the bar to petitioners’ entry into the United States is constitutionally valid, their resulting harborage at Guantanamo Bay is constitutional as well.

Somewhat shockingly, as ABC’s Jake Tapper notes, the Obama administration’s petition suggests that the Uighurs’ imprisonment “isn’t so bad,” and trumpets their comfy quarters at Guantanamo:

“In contrast to individuals currently detained as enemies under the laws of war, petitioners are being housed under relatively unrestrictive conditions, given the status of Guantanamo Bay as a United States military base,” Kagan writes, saying they are “in special communal housing with access to all areas of their camp, including an outdoor recreation space and picnic area.” They “sleep in an air-conditioned bunk house and have the use of an activity room equipped with various recreational items, including a television with VCR and DVD players, a stereo system, and sports equipment.”

Furthermore, the petition cites the Senate’s recent vote to block Guantanamo detainees from entering the U.S. as further reason to deny their release — despite the fact the vote was in defiance of a White House request. The petition comes just a week after President Obama, in a speech defending his plan to close Guantanamo, declared that “the wrong answer is to pretend like this problem will go away if we maintain an unsustainable status quo.”

Scott Carpenter, director of WINEP’s Project Fikra, on the president’s choice of Cairo for his address next week:

Led by an octogenarian who has been in power since Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981, Egypt persists as an authoritarian regime lacking any truly democratic institutions, making this speech Obama’s first delivered in a nondemocracy.This latter fact perhaps explains why White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs emphasized that the speech’s scope was “bigger than where the speech was going to be given or who is the leadership of the country,” during the press briefing announcing it.

This attempt at evasion, however, fails to fully address the downside of the choice of venue. There is no way for the president to travel to Egypt without providing implicit support for the Mubarak regime.

Marc Lynch, who voiced similar concerns about the venue, yesterday zeroed in on “the key question for Obama’s trip the region, his speech, and his strategic approach both to Iran and the Israeli-Arab tracks: Will he reinforce or challenge the ‘moderates vs resistance’ frame which he inherited from the Bush administration?”

The Arab leaders he has been meeting, like the Israelis, are perfectly comfortable with that approach, dividing the region between Israel and Arab “moderates” vs Iran and Arab “resistance” groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. That’s the easy path. If followed it is likely to fail badly, destroy the hopes for change which his engagement policy has raised, and leave the region right back where Bush left it. But I think — and hope — that Obama will not fall into that trap.

He has an opportunity over the next few weeks — with the unveiling of his approach to Israel and the Palestinians, the response to the Lebanese and Iranian elections, and his Cairo speech — to break down those tired, dangerous, and unpopular lines of division. And if he chooses to do that, to really challenge the unsustainable status quo, then Riyadh and Cairo are the right place to start.

Underlying all of these concerns, of course, is the disrepute into which the idea of democracy promotion has fallen in the region, in the wake of Bush’s failed freedom agenda — understandable, considering that the central showpiece for that agenda was the Iraq war.

In February, my colleague Brian Katulis published a paper encouraging the Obama administration to reclaim the mantle of democracy promotion, and laid out a strategy for doing that. Read it here (pdf).