I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”
— Lewis Carroll
As the New York Times reports today, a federal appeals court yesterday found that accusations against a Uighur detainee held for more than six years at Guantanamo were based on bare and unverifiable claims.
“With some derision,” the 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. In its ruling, the court quoted Lewis Carroll, saying, “This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true.”
The detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, was a fruit seller. He and 16 other Uighur detainees cannot be returned to China since there is a reasonable fear that they would be detained and tortured.
As close observers report, this case is not unusual. Only 8 percent of the 517 detainees at Guantanamo were described by the US government as Al Qaeda fighters according to a Seton Hall study. The same study, using only official documents, found that over hald had committed no hostile acts against the United States. Eighty-six percent were not captured by Americans, but were rather taken by Pakistan or the now-defunct Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, then handed over to US forces in exchange for bounties.
Very snarky indeed…
