GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- The Obama administration is appealing a federal judge's month-old order to set free a 47-year-old Yemeni held here for 7 ½ years who admitted to meeting Osama bin Laden at his brother-in-law's wedding party.

Justice Department lawyers filed a one-page notice on Monday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and will follow up with their reasoning and perhaps oral arguments later this fall.

On Aug. 17, U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler ordered the release of Mohammed Adahi, 47, who had earlier testified by video link from the prison camp that he had met the al Qaeda founder socially during the summer before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but had never worked for him nor waged jihad.

The move follows a series of setbacks at the federal court, where Justice Department attorneys have lost 30 habeas corpus petitions by Guantánamo detainees since the U.S. Supreme Court extended unlawful detention suits to this remote base in summer 2008. The federal judges have upheld the indefinite detentions of seven captives here.

Adahi, a father of two with a heart condition, had long maintained he was captured during what was meant to be a two-month vacation from a Yemeni oil refinery. He said he was escorting his sister to an arranged marriage with a fellow Yemeni, who did have ties to bin Laden, in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Kessler called the government's case unpersuasive and lacking in valid evidence. Although ``sensational,'' she said, the Yemeni's acknowledgement of ``having met bin Laden on two occasions'' and his admission that ``perhaps his relatives were bodyguards and enthusiastic followers of bin Laden,'' did not ``constitute actual, reliable evidence that would justify the government's detention of this man.''

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