Two Iraqi brothers detained by U.S. government released

LOS ANGELES (CNN) -- Two Kurdish brothers incarcerated since 1997 were cleared and freed by a judge Friday after a retrial in which government evidence against them was declassified.

The men, who were also granted political asylum, plan to fly to northern Virginia Saturday to visit their mother.

The federal government had held the men, arguing that they presented a security risk to the United States. But for years, the government would not reveal what kind of threat the men posed or why they were suspects, a fact that had generated some criticism.

The brothers, along with a group of other Kurdish men in Southern California, had been incarcerated in a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service detention center. The men were members of an Iraqi resistance group, backed by the CIA.

Niels Frenzen of the Public Counsel Law Center told CNN that the declassification of evidence in July allowed him to present a "meaningful defense" and allowed the men to finally "confront their accusers."

The other men in the group reached a settlement in June 1999 with the INS that enabled them to join their families in Lincoln, Nebraska, last June. Those men had been in custody since March of 1997.

The two men released Friday -- Dr. Ali Yasim Mohammed Karim, a radiologist, and his brother Mohammed Yassin Mohammed Karim -- had rejected the earlier settlement and pushed for a retrial.

Under the terms of last year's settlement, the other Kurdish men remain under house arrest until the State Department finds a third country that will take them in and not detain or deport them to Iraq.

While under house arrest in Nebraska, the men are under surveillance, their phones are tapped and their homes can be searched during daylight hours. They are also required to make daily telephone check-ins with the INS. The wives and children of the six men were granted asylum.

All of the men were part of a group of 6,500 Iraqi refugees that the U.S. government evacuated to the island of Guam in 1996 after a CIA-backed attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein failed. All but a few of these have since been allowed to naturalize.

The two brothers released Friday had retained their original counsel, which included Frenzen and former CIA Director James Woolsey during the May-June retrial.

Woolsey joined the Iraqi's defense team last March in hopes that his high-level security clearance would enable him to review evidence against the Iraqis that is classified and help their case. Woolsey told CNN that he considered the seven men "comrades in arms" and referred to the government's handling of the case as "very Kafka-esque."

In July, the FBI released some 500 pages of evidence that they said had originally been improperly classified. Frenzen said the evidence that was released consists mainly of testimony from FBI agents who conducted interviews, but did not investigate the Iraqis while they were being processed on the island of Guam.

One other Iraqi remains incarcerated in Northern California.

The government could still appeal the judge's decision.

Calls to the INS were not immediately returned.

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