DC Court Of Appeals Mocks Enemy Combatant Argument

by Steve Soto

There's a reason why court oversight of the Bush Administration detainee policies is critical. Here is Exhibit A:

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.

It should be noted that the three-judge panel was not composed of liberals, but rather two Bush/Reagan conservatives and a Clinton appointee from the DC circuit. They reviewed the "secret" evidence the Bush Administration used to justify the defendant's indefinite detention as an enemy combatant, and found it not credible. The administration's simple argument here, like it is everywhere else including the FISA battle, is that everyone should simply trust them because they are trying to protect us from a Muslim fruit peddler.