Now that the alleged grounds for locking people up in Guantanamo are finally seeing, if not the light of day, at least the light of federal judges’ chambers, it looks as though the government has been bluffing all along:

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.

Okay, who is surprised? Show of hands?

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