A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
by Meg White

"I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."
--from Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark

The prosecution team at Guantanamo is having a tough time lately, but Monday was a double-header.

Though war crimes charges were levied against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of plotting the 2000 attack on U.S. Navy destroyer Cole, they might not stick. The defendant is one of three whom the CIA has admitted to torturing.

Al-Nashiri said Monday [1] that he had no part in attacking the Cole. He said he confessed to get his interrogators to stop torturing him.

Also, previously classified court documents were released [2] Monday that explained a U.S. Court of Appeals decision labeling the detention of a Chinese man captured in Afghanistan unlawful. Earlier this month, the three-judge panel found that the government's assertions of Huzaifa Parhat's enemy combatant status were baseless.

The government contended the status should stick because it had been repeated three times in secret documents. This assertion was met with derision by the judges, one appointed by President George W. Bush, one by President Bill Clinton, and the third by President Ronald Reagan. They likened the government's logic to a 19th century nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll [3], saying the assertion "comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true."

Parhat, an Uighur Muslim from Western China, was accused of attending a terror training camp in Afghanistan. After seven years of detention at Guantanamo, he maintains his innocence. The ruling dictates Parhat must be released, transferred, or given a new hearing.

Monday's judicial events came on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling that granted Guantamano detainees constitutional basic rights, such as habeas corpus.

However, another former U.S. detainee didn't fare as well. Check out BuzzFlash's news alert [3] about a Canadian national whose torture was outsourced to Syria.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

Technorati Tags: Alerts [9] torture [10] guantanamo [11] enemy combatant [12] cole [13] afghanistan [14]