"What I Tell You Three Times Is True"

June 30, 7:58 PMProgressive Politics ExaminerJay McDonough

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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 allegations against an ethnic Chinese man held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims, according to the decision released Monday.

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its allegations against a 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 Lewis Carroll character: “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 United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

On the D.C. Court of Appeals, Sentelle voted to overturn the convictions of Oliver North and John Poindexter, along with Judge Laurence Silberman. He was one of the judges responsible for appointing Kenneth Starr to replace Robert B. Fiske as lead independent council to investigate President Bill Clinton.

In 2007, in Boumediene v. Bush, 375 U.S. App. D.C. 48, Judge Sentelle concurred with Judge Arthur Raymond Randolph, relying on Johnson v. Eisentrager, to uphold the Military Commissions Act's suspension of habeas corpus for enemy combatants as constitutional. Judge Judith Ann Wilson Rogers dissented. (Wikipedia)