The four Uighurs who splashed in the Bahama sea on the front page of the New York Times last month, after their release from Guantanamo, left the impression that what awaited the other 13 Uighur detainees — also deemed no terrorist threat to the U.S.— were sandy beaches, pineapples, and no future concerns more serious than swimmer’s ear.

In reality, the Uighurs left imprisoned at Guantanamo remain caught in the middle of a legal wrangle involving all three branches of government, an impasse which appears less likely to find quick resolution after this Monday’s declaration by the Supreme Court that it will delay any action on the Uighur’s petition for release until at least September.

Congress, the Obama administration, and the D.C. courts have been circling one another for the past year, each branch with a distinct view of the detainees’ predicament and each eager to criticize one another’s proposed solutions. Meanwhile, the Uighurs remain at Guantanamo Bay, much as they have for the past eight years, without the “enemy combatant” nametag but also without a definite release date.

The Chinese Muslims have been in detention since 2001, despite the U.S. military having admitted that they were never members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban, and pose no danger to the United States. In 2005, the Uighurs filed a suit asking that they be released into the U.S., since no other nation seemed eager to take them.

At first, their case met little success. But then, in 2008, the Court decided Boumedienne v. Bush, ensuring detainees their habeas right to question the grounds for imprisonment. Not only that — the Court claimed the power to “order the conditional release of an individual unlawfully detained.”

The Uighurs enjoyed a brief victory in October of last year, when a judge ordered their release into the United States, citing the danger of “unbridled executive fiat.” But an appeals court said that judge was out of line.

“Not every right yields a remedy,’ it wrote, “even when that right is constitutional.” All that the Uighurs were entitled, it said, to was a promise from the administration that it was working on their release.

In their petition to the Supreme Court, the Uighurs argued that the appeals court had a skewed interpretation of their habeas rights. Without a tangible remedy, they said, the satisfaction of knowing that you are entitled to freedom means nothing.

“The majority’s taxidermy would hang Boumedienne in the law library, impressive but lifeless,” the Uighurs’ petition read.

Complicating the Uighurs’ case, Congress passed a law in mid-June expressly prohibiting the administration from transferring any Guantanamo detainees to the U.S., except with a detailed plan for prosecuting them.

Meanwhile, as the Washington Post recently reported, the Obama administration is floating a framework for indefinite detention of certain Guantanamo detainees by executive order. This would likely apply only to the trickiest Guantanamo cases — those detained who are considered too dangerous to release but difficult to prosecute.

But the possibility that Obama would consider a unilateral decree of indefinite imprisonment has plenty of civil rights groups up in arms, and releasing the Uighurs could drag out indefinitely if the President has no legal compunction to free them.

With Congress unwilling to take any freed prisoners and the Administration looking for a means to put off freeing them, the Court lawsuit seemed like the most immediate form of recourse.

If the Supreme Court doesn’t act on the Uighurs’ petition in September, though, the issue of what habeas relief really means is unlikely to be resolved.

“The U.S. government has acknowledged that these 17 men are wrongly imprisoned and have nowhere safe to go. Seven years is too long for such a grand mistake to go without a remedy,” said Emi MacLean, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

The Court’s decision to put off examining the Uighur’s case could give the administration time in which to devise a plan that is acceptable to Congress, the courts and the Uighurs alike — most likely to find other countries like the island nation of Palau willing to take resettle them after release.

It could, though, simply mean that the Uighurs languish in Guantanamo as other issues take precedence. At the very least, it means they won’t be swimming in the Bahamas for a while.

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