U.S. Evidence in Guantanamo Case Absurd

"...With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its allegations against a 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 Lewis Carroll character: “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 United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

"The unanimous panel overturned as invalid a Pentagon determination that a 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...

"...Mr. Parhat, a former fruit peddler who once passed a message to his wife in China that she should remarry because his imprisonment at Guantánamo was like already being dead..."

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