From the Miami Herald: Chinese detainee ruling quotes nonsense poem.
A federal court that ruled against the Bush administration in a Guantánamo detainee case ridiculed Defense Department reasoning as nonsensical, likening it to a 19th century Lewis Carroll poem.
On June 20, the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned as ''invalid'' a Pentagon finding that Huzaifa Parhat was an ''enemy combatant,'' a Bush administration classification.In a first, it directed the government to either release or transfer the 37-year-old China-born Muslim from the ethnic Uighur minority or subject him to a new, legitimate tribunal using sound evidence.
Monday, the court released a partially censored 39-page opinion that explained its finding.
Notably, it said it was suspicious of the three pieces of secret evidence U.S. military panels used to declare Parhat an enemy combatant. The category allows the Pentagon to hold post-9/11 foreign detainees indefinitely and without charge, throughout the duration of the war on terror.
Rather than being three pieces of evidence, the court said, the documents from the State and Defense Departments may have all cited the same, single source.
Moreover, absent proof otherwise, Parhat's lawyers may be right in saying that source was the government of communist China, which the United States says persecutes Uighurs for their religion and effort to establish autonomy in China.
''We are not persuaded,'' the panel wrote.
'Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has `said it thrice' does not make an allegation true.''
Then for the sake of clarity, it disclosed its source:
Through the Looking-Glass author Lewis Carroll's 1876 poem called The Hunting of the Snark, a humorous account of an absurd international voyage by a 10-member crew whose names all begin with `B.'
They include a baker, a beaver, a bellman and a barrister. The ruling went so far as to quote the relevant line, I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.
The Parhat ruling, written by Judge Merrick Garland, a Harvard Law-educated Clinton appointee, has so far been a theoretical victory.Parhat has been held more than six years. He's among a group of ethnic Uighurs from western China who were allegedly getting paramilitary training to fight against their government in a camp near Tora Bora, Afghanistan, and shipped to Guantánamo in May 2002.
The Uighur captives have said through their lawyers that they have no conflict with the United States and in fact admired its freedom to practice religion, in contrast to China's communist regime.
The Bush administration has concluded that Uighurs released from Guantánamo would be subject to religious persecution in China and has for some time been seeking a third country to offer them asylum.
Meantime, the Uighurs are held like other ''enemy combatants'' -- in austere single occupancy cellblocks -- at the sprawling prison camps in southeast Cuba.
Boston attorney Sabin P. Willett, who has championed the cause of the Uighurs at Guantánamo, said prison camp commanders have denied requests to move Parhat and the others to a ``less restrictive camp.''
Unclear Monday was whether Parhat knew of the decision. Commanders denied his lawyers an opportunity to brief him by telephone, Willett said.
He has described his client as in despair over whether he will ever see his family again.
''He has a wife and child and a mother whose health is failing,'' the attorney said Monday. ``Last fall, Huzaifa with great sorrow, instructed us to tell his wife to remarry, as he had concluded he would never leave Guantánamo.''
At the Justice Department Monday, spokesman Erik Ablin said the government had not yet decided how to respond to the June 20 ruling. ''We are evaluating our options,'' he said.
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