June 30, 2008: Federal Appeals Court Rejects ‘Enemy Combatant’ Status of Guantanamo Detainee, Criticizes Logic of Prosecutor’s Case

A federal appeals court overturns a Defense Department determination that Guantanamo detainee Huzaifa Parhat has been properly held as an enemy combatant. The three judges, including one very conservative judge, unanimously reject the allegations made against Parhat. Parhat is a member of the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority in western China, and has been held at Guantanamo for more than six years. The Defense Department claims that Parhat is “affiliated” with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a Uighur resistance group, and that this group in turn is “associated” with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. But the court says the classified evidence provided little to no support for these claims. The court mocks the government assertion that its accusations against Parhat should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents, comparing this to the 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.” The ruling states, “This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true.” But while Parhat’s enemy combatant status is rejected, it is unclear what this will actually mean for him. US officials say they cannot return him to China for fear the Chinese government will mistreat him, and no other country has been willing to accept him or the 16 other Uighurs held at Guantanamo. This is the first case reviewing the government’s secret evidence for holding a Guantanamo detainee, and observers suggest the ruling could broadly affect other detainees because of its skeptical view of the government’s evidence. [New York Times, 7/1/2008]