Since then, Congress has prohibited the use of federal funds for transfers and now requires detailed notification two weeks before future moves.

Bermuda provided the plane that flew the Uighurs to freedom, sparking a brief row with Britain over whether it had been properly informed. Also aboard the Gulfstream jet were White House General Counsel Gregory Craig, State Department envoy Fried and two attorneys from the Boston firm Bingham McCutchen, Sabin Willett and Susan Baker Manning.

Bingham lawyers had for years fought the Uighurs' case in the courts and media while quietly approaching what Willett described as ``dozens'' of countries to take the men.

None bit. In the process, Willett taught countless journalists how to pronounce Uighur -- wee-ghur.

But other transfer deals that simmered during the Bush years came to fruition once Obama announced plans to close the camps.

Consider Lakhdar Boumediene, an Algerian made famous because his is the first name on a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on Guantánamo.

Now 42, Boumediene lives in the south of France, an idea that jelled over a March 10 lunch at the French Embassy in Washington.

Attorney Rob Kirsch drank Perrier. Two diplomats drank wine. A tuxedoed waiter served veal while Kirsch told his client's story:

Captured in Sarajevo. Taken to Guantánamo by way of the U.S. base at Incirlik, Turkey. Accused and cleared of an unrealized plot to attack the U.S. embassy in Bosnia Herzegovina. Fought and won the right for all Guantánamo captives to have their cases heard by civilian courts in Boumediene v. Bush.

``In my five years on the case, it was the best working meal I ever had,'' Kirsch said.

On April 1, he got a call from a French diplomat who said that President Nicolas Sarkozy had agreed to take in Boumediene. Two days later, in Strasbourg, Sarkozy announced after a bilateral meeting with Obama that France would resettle a Guantánamo detainee.

``I was delivering an extremely low-risk, high-profile prisoner and that I thought that would be attractive to President Sarkozy,'' Kirsch said.

On its own, Boumediene's legal team lobbied France's equivalent of a CIA director, Bernard Bajolet. Bajolet was French ambassador to Sarajevo in 2002, when Boumediene was hustled off to Guantánamo, and had condemned it then.

The French and Algerian governments cooperated to get Boumediene's wife and daughters travel papers to leave Algeria, something that would usually require a husband or father to accompany them. They were in France to greet him May 15.

Kirsch and the captive worked together between Boston and the prison's Camp Iguana to write a formal request to Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner.

It was all exchanged by computer and shuttled between Boston and Boumediene's barbed-wire encircled wooden hut by prison camp staff, so Boumediene was able to leave Guantánamo with travel papers from the French -- using a photo downloaded from Wikipedia.

``It showed what would happen if they cooperate with the lawyers,'' Kirsch said of the State Department, ``how easily they could get that place emptied.''

Earlier this month, an administration official said, a lawyer from the New York Center for Constitutional Rights met special envoy Fried's staffers at the State Department. The law group joined European and U.S. human rights groups in championing the cause of detainees during the Bush administration.