[Salon] Judges Invoke Lewis Carroll In Detainee Case | Courthouse News Service

[Todd Pierce <tepierce@outlook.com>]

See below for why Merrick Garland should have been put on to the Supreme Court, if only for his willingness to challenge USG/CIA lies related to Guantanamo, unlike the conservatives now packing the Court, when this was the “evidentiary standard” used by the CIA/DOJ: "I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."

Here is the exchange  between AP reporter Matt Lee and State Dept. spokesperson Ned Price where that standard is asserted: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwhlhYW9f9Q

Take it here as “evidence” of Russia’s “malign” intent, as that is all that is necessary  for folks eager for war with Russia, and eager to believe whatever lie the CIA has them spoon fed with as “evidence.” I leave it to them to judge its credibility, though knowing they’re too far gone with war fever to exercise sound judgement on such an important issue as putting the world at risk of a nuclear cataclysm, to be honest. 

Furthermore, anyone still supporting US wars after the last 20 years of illegal wars of aggression by the US makes them in fact, if not legally, culpable of the war crime of incitement of aggressive war, a war crime too, as decided at Nuremberg. Perhaps if we begin seeing ourselves and our crimes for what we, and they, really are, we might begin a self-examination of “US Exceptionalism” and decide we don’t want to be like our WW II adversaries were? 

However, for a Guantanamo defense attorney as I remain on an appellate case, I am well acquainted with how the USG intelligence services and military “make their own reality,” as Karl Rove put it, and have repeatedly seen their lies asserted in court filings, and in what was said by the Military Commissions Chief Prosecutors.

https://www.courthousenews.com/judges-invoke-lewis-carroll-in-detainee-case/

Judges Invoke Lewis Carroll In Detainee Case

Courthouse News Staff / July 1, 2008

WASHINGTON (CN) - The D.C. Circuit likened the government's reasons for classifying a Chinese Muslim detainee at Guantanamo as an "enemy combatant" to the faulty logic of a Lewis Carroll poem. The government suggested that its allegations against Huzaifa Parhat are reliable because they show up in at least three intelligence documents.

The court compared the government's logic to Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark," in which a character declares, "I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."

The court said the government cannot justify its detention of Parhat using a similar bald assertion.

"Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has 'said it thrice' does not make an allegation true," Judge Garland wrote in the unclassified decision released Monday. "This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true."

The court overruled the Combatant Status Review Tribunal's decision that Parhat is an enemy combatant and ordered the government to "release or to transfer Parhat, or to expeditiously hold a new tribunal consistent with the court's opinion." Parhat has been in U.S. custody in Cuba for more than six years.

The decision came on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling that the approximately 270 detainees at Guantanamo have a constitutional right to challenge their detention in federal courts.

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