APPEALS COURT BLOWS WHISTLE ON GITMO CASE

WILLIAM GLABERSON, NY TIMES In the first case to review the government's secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantanamo 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. . . 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.