Last week, TalkLeft called attention to an appellate decision that found insufficient evidence to justify the government's detention (for six years) of Huzaifa Parhat as an enemy combatant. The unclassified version of the court's decision (pdf) has been released. It reveals the court's impatience with the administration's arguments.

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.

Isn't that exactly what the Bush administration has been saying ever since 9/11?