GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- The Uighur Muslim detainees whose fate is to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court have learned of the court action, a prison camps spokesman said Wednesday.

From the BBC. In English.

U.S. guards posted a BBC news article on a bulletin board inside Camp Iguana, the razor-wire-ringed compound on the fringes of the detention center where the Pentagon confines the 13 citizens of China, whom a judge ordered set free a year ago.

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt said the news article went up Tuesday afternoon, once the Supreme Court justices announced that they will consider the case of whether detainees found unlawfully held at Guantánamo can be released in the United States.

``There was no reason not to tell them about it,'' said DeWalt, describing it as ``just another opportunity'' to keep detainees informed on news developments related to the camps.

The men were captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and turned over to U.S. forces as suspect foreigners during the U.S. invasion. They have consistently said they left communist China to flee persecution as Muslims and were not enemies of the United States.

U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina agreed with them a year ago, in a habeas corpus petition, and ordered their release, setting the stage for the Supreme Court showdown over whether a federal judge or the executive can decide if a Guantánamo detainee can be brought to U.S. soil.

Congress has also sought to ban releases of cleared Guantánamo detainees into the United States.

One of the men, Arkin Mahmoud, 45, also got the word by telephone from his lawyer in Connecticut, who already had an attorney-client call scheduled for Tuesday.

``He took it respectfully. But he's not jumping up and down and I don't think the others [are] either,'' said Eizabeth Gilson of New Haven, Mahmoud's pro-bono attorney.

``Basically they don't have stars in their eyes about any cases,'' she explained. ``They're thankful that we are working hard on the lawsuits. But they were told for eight years that they would be leaving soon. They were told in Kandahar [Afghanistan] that they were not guilty.''

Six of the 13 Uighurs held in the camps have agreed to resettlement in the Pacific island nation of Palau, and could be leaving later this month.

Four other men ordered released by the courts are now living in Bermuda as guest workers, finding employment on a Professional Golf Association course. Even before the courts ruled, the Pentagon sent a further five Uighurs once held here to Albania, in May 2006.

In agreeing to hear the case, the Supreme Court accepted their fifth enemy-combatant-related challenge since the Bush administration set up the prison camps here at Guantánamo. But the timetable for briefs and oral arguments means they will rule after President Barack Obama's Jan. 22 deadline for closing the camps. Senior administration officials have said that timetable may slip.