So how do you throw a case like this out on appeal and free an innocent man after years of captivity and torture? M
Go to this link to read the entire article (free registration and log in required):
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/wa...itmo.html?_r=1
Evidence Faulted in Detainee Case
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
Published: July 1, 2008
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 accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. The unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday.
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.
The unanimous panel overturned as invalid a Pentagon determination that the 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.
The release on Monday of the unclassified parts of the decision followed a brief court notice last week. The notice said a classified decision had directed the government to release Mr. Parhat, transfer him to another country or conduct a new military hearing at Guantánamo to determine if he had been properly classified as an enemy combatant.
The Justice Department declined to comment on the ruling.
Although the decision was a defeat for the Bush administration, it was unclear what it might mean immediately for Mr. Parhat, a former fruit peddler who in recent years sent a message to his wife that she should remarry because his imprisonment at Guantánamo was like already being dead.
American officials have said that they cannot return Mr. Parhat and 16 other Uighur detainees at Guantánamo to China for fear of mistreatment and that some 100 other countries have refused to accept them.
Detainees’ lawyers said the ruling in the case of Mr. Parhat, who says he went to Afghanistan in 2001 to escape China, could broadly affect other detainees because of its skeptical view of the government’s evidence.