mccain-punch.thumbnail.jpgI’m sure this will draw no media coverage — given the outrage that is questioning John McCain’s ability to be President — how dare the Democrats!

But this sure seems like the kind of bullcrap that we really don’t want from an Administration — even though it is considered huggable by McCain:

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 unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday.

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.”

“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 panel included one of the court’s most conservative members, the chief judge, David B. Sentelle.

Lie three times, just like St. Peter. Naturally, these Bush-agents consider this the ultimate in religious behavior. Three strikes and you’re devout.

The plight of these Uighur Muslims has been discussed here before.

the Uighur (or Uyghurs) are a less known, but no less repressed culture within China, located in a territory with the rather awkward "Mao-tastic" name of the "Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region" [which in fairness may just be chinese for "South Dakota"] in the far west of the country and bordering Afghanistan amongst other places. It is in Afghanistan where these individuals were swept up by American forces [along with many others who were not terrorists, but bounty-victims of various warlords taking advantage of American gullibility].

Some of these individuals were tortured and we knew that would happen in advance and helped:

Buried in a Department of Justice report released Tuesday are new allegations about a 2002 arrangement between the United States and China, which allowed Chinese intelligence to visit Guantanamo and interrogate Chinese Uighurs held there.

According to the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, an FBI agent reported a detainee belonging to China’s ethnic Uighur minority and a Uighur translator told him Uighur detainees were kept awake for long periods, deprived of food and forced to endure cold for hours on end, just prior to questioning by Chinese interrogators.

And who is this gentlemen and what plight have we put him in?

Although the decision was a defeat for the Bush administration, it was unclear what it might mean immediately for Mr. Parhat, a former fruit peddler who in recent years sent a message to his wife that she should remarry because his imprisonment at Guantánamo was like already being dead.

American officials have said that they cannot return Mr. Parhat and 16 other Uighur detainees at Guantánamo to China for fear of mistreatment and that some 100 other countries have refused to accept them.

And I guess we would know that because we tortured the poor saps.

Yet, if John McCain had his way, people like Parhat could sit in GITMO and die — disappearing quietly and without notice in the shadows — just like the classic nightmare dictatorship he does not give a crap. George Orwell would recognize the world McCain wants to perpetuate.

Not that this ever gets mentioned by those reporters competing to sit up front with him next to the "Captain’s Chair".