Feds: If We Say It Thrice, It Must Be True

Last week, it was announced that a District Court of Appeals had found that the classification of a Uighur held at Guantánamo Bay as an “unlawful combatant” was inappropriate; the Government needed to either revisit his classification or release him.   The appellant’s attorney was reported as looking forward to passing along the news…but was unable to do so since his client was being held in isolation, incommunicado.

The New York Times is reporting that the unclassified portion of the opinion has been released.  This passage in the story caught my eye:

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.

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.”

“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.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly why our government has a system of checks and balances.  If one branch of the government gets a little too full of itself, another can step in and impose some amount of reason, thereby reducing the chance our government devolves into a totalitarian regime.

I don’t object in principle to the idea that those who really threaten public safety should be detained.  However, the process by which the threat they pose is neutralized must permit a fair process to review the assessment of that threat.

You’d think that given after all this time, the process we have today wouldn’t rely on Executive fiat or the use of a tame, kangaroo court.

Apparently the federal courts would seem inclined to agree.