More Worst of Worst Going Free

Update: See McClatchy's Guantanamo: Beyond the Law series for a close look at administration lawlessness, and its utter inhumanity toward the innocent.

From the Times, Judge Orders Five Detainees Freed From Guantanamo:

In the first hearing on the government's justification for holding detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, a federal judge ruled Thursday that five Algerian men were held unlawfully for nearly seven years and ordered their release.

Bush and Cheney had called these innocents the worst of the worst, who are so evil and dangerous that we just had to throw out habeas corpus.

The Bush administration feared the consequences of innocents asking for a look at the evidence in federal court.

As human rights attorney, Scott Horton, writes: "... (T)he Bush Administration’s claims about the prisoners were revealed to be a sham not backed by serious evidence. The Bush Administration’s incarceration of five of the six petitioners was pronounced an unlawful, and indeed possibly criminal act."

Par for the course for this administration that is the single worst enemy to the cause of freedom in modern American history.

Obama has promised to close the camp, the beginning of a reversal of the Bush administration's horrid record on human rights and individual liberty.

Lies Catching Up to Bush Administration

Famed journalist I.F. Stone warned "All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed."

Like in many other aspects of government, the Bush administration has veered to the extreme in its mendacity.

Guantánamo Bay holds only the worst of the worst, the administration repeatedly assured the American public after preventing examination of the evidence holding the accused.

Turns out the administration (as McClatchy news demonstrated in its America's prison for terrorists often held the wrong men in mid-June) is the worst of the worst in its commitment to bald-faced lying.

Today's Post and Times report on the duplicity of the administration that contends in legal arguments that because the Chinese government said so and the assertions were repeated several times by American officials, accused terrorist, Huzaifa Parhat, a Uighur Muslim who fled a persecuting Chinese government, must be a terrorist.

The argument was ridiculed and dismissed by a conservative, unanimous appellate panel:

From the Times:

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.” ...

The Uighur Muslims, who come from an area of far western China they call East Turkestan, claim oppression at the hands of the Chinese government, including forced abortions and relocations of educated people to remote areas.

The Chinese government has described the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as a terrorist organization. American officials agreed in 2002, when they were pressing for Chinese support for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

See the opinion at Huzaifa Parhat v. Robert M. Gates et al (No 06-1307).