Gitmo Snark

by digby

‘Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave captain to thank’
(So the crew would protest) ‘that he’s bought us the best —
A perfect and absolute blank!’

In the first case to review the government’s secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. The unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday.

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The unanimous panel overturned as invalid a Pentagon determination that the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, a member of the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority in western China, was properly held as an enemy combatant.

The panel included one of the court’s most conservative members, the chief judge, David B. Sentelle.

As I wrote earlier, this doesn’t solve the Parhat’s dilemma, however, which is far more Kafka than Carroll. But at least we are seeing a tiny bit of sanity from one corner of the US Government on these issues. The recognition of he absurdity of the government’s claims is a step in the right direction.

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