Ah, justice

"I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."

That is a quote from a Lewis Carroll poem. It's also the three-judge Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which compared the Bush administration's arguments for detaining Chinese national Huzaifa Parhat at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to the ridiculousness of "The Hunting of the Snark".

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.

...

"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.

Wow, Sentelle must be a real, actual conservative, as opposed to a Bush "conservative"—the former still cares about due process and the rule of law. This is the same Huzaifa Parhat, you will recall, whose case started the whole shebang recently about habeas corpus.

I'm sure people like Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia will ramble on about how this means we'll see a mushroom cloud over an American city, or how this is really a victory of Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (a.k.a. the Iranian Steve Gutenberg—think about it, they kind of look alike), but real Americans like you and me know this is the entire point of our little republic, that the law is supreme and everyone has rights.

Quaint, isn't it?