I've always liked Lewis Carroll; my father used to recite "Jabberwocky" to me before I went to bed. Glad to see Lewis put to good use by the U.S. Court of Appeals in their first review of the military tribunals at Guantanamo:
The three-member court, which was made up of two Republican judges and one Democrat, was particularly pointed in its criticism of the logic that evidence is reliable because it appears on multiple documents.
"The government insists that the statements made in the documents are reliable because the State and Defense Departments would not have put them in intelligence documents were that not the case," the court wrote. "This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true."
The judges compared the argument to the logic in Carroll's nonsense poem ["The Hunting of the Snark"]. The Bellman lead his crew across the ocean, guided by a map that was just a blank piece of paper. He rallied and reassured his crew simply by repeat himself.
"I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true," the Bellman says in the poem.
"Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has 'said it thrice' does not make an allegation true," the court wrote.
The court held that the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, should either receive a new hearing or be released.
--Phoebe Connelly
