Not befitting of a great nation

Some might say it's excusable to torture an innocent detainee to death, or to detain war combatants for no reason, these are just isolated instances. After all, nothing is worse than the videoed beheadings we've seen or the way that the enemy extremists have tortured. But as a nation as great as these United States, do we need to stoop to that level for no apparent reason? The Supreme Court has ruled we shouldn't. Now the courts will expose the Bush policy for what it is... illegal war crimes.

NYT:

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 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 3 judge panel included one of the court’s most conservative members, the chief judge, David B. Sentelle, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, and Judge Thomas B. Griffith, a 2005 appointee of President Bush.