“I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

The above quote from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was evoked by a judge in the first decision since the US Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo Bay prisoners should have recourse to civil courts. The court said:

First, the government suggests that several of the assertions in the intelligence documents are reliable because they are made in at least three different documents.  We are not persuaded. Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has “said it thrice” does not make an allegation true.  See LEWIS CARROLL, THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK 3 (1876) (“I have said it thrice:  What I tell you three times is true.”).  In fact, we have no basis for concluding that there are independent sources for the documents’ thrice-made assertions.  To the contrary, as noted in Part III, many of those assertions are made in identical language, suggesting that later documents may merely be citing earlier ones, and hence that all may ultimately derive from a single source.  And as we have also noted, Parhat has made a credible argument that — at least for some of the assertions — the common source is the Chinese government, which may be less than objective with respect to the Uighurs.  Other assertions in the documents may ultimately rely on interview reports (not provided to the Tribunal) of Uighur detainees, who may have had no first-hand knowledge and whose speculations may have been transformed into certainties in the course of being repeated by report writers. 

Hopefully this is a step further in the direction of closing down the Guanatnamo Bay facility, or at least stop its illegal status of no-law zone. This is the 21st century and democratic countries should no better than to tolerate this abuse of basic principles of the rule of law.