One of the guys that Andy McCarthy wanted to machine gun down:

A Chinese Muslim at Guantanamo Bay got a small measure of vindication Monday when a federal appeals court announced it had thrown out his designation as an enemy combatant, marking a setback for the Bush administration.

The ruling in favor of Huzaifa Parhat comes in the first of what eventually could be 160 or so such court reviews filed by Guantanamo Bay detainees in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

To be sure, the cases of Parhat and a small number of other Chinese Muslim detainees — known as Uighurs — are a unique sub-category of the cases involving roughly 270 detainee at Guantanamo Bay.

The Justice Department concedes that Parhat never fought against the U.S. and says it has no evidence he was planning to do so.

The case hinges on Parhat’s connection to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a militant group that demands separation from China and that the military says has some ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network.

The United States named the East Turkestan Islamic Movement a terrorist group in 2002, a move that some international affairs analysts say was made to appease China and ensure it would not oppose the invasion of Iraq.