Appeals Court: This comes close to suggesting that "whatever the government says must be treated as true"

By GottaLaff

The Queen:

Sentence first -- verdict afterwards.
Alice:
If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?
Alice:
It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.
The Duchess:
Tut, tut, child! Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.
The Cat:
We're all mad here.

Once upon a time...

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 allegations against an ethnic Chinese man held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims, according to the decision released Monday.

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.

United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit:

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.”

It gets curiouser and curiouser:

“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.

Maybe we're finally climbing back up and peeking out of the rabbit hole.