EVIDENCE? WE DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' EVIDENCE

One thread that runs through the several strands of American conservatism is the distrust of evidence. We can go from global warming denial to Intelligent Design Creationism to reports on the economy, past and present and what unites these positions is denial of empirical evidence. The prisoners at Guantanamo have also been subject to the cavalier attitude to facts and now a Federal court has rebuked the criminal Bush regime with a bit of real snark.

Evidence Faulted in Detainee Case
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
Published: July 1, 2008
NY Times

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 Times also provides some excerpts from the judges' decision:

Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has “said it thrice” does not make an allegation true. See LEWIS CARROLL, THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK 3 (1876) (”I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”). In fact, we have no basis for concluding that there are independent sources for the documents’ thrice-made assertions.

Many of those assertions are made in identical language, suggesting that later documents may merely be citing earlier ones, and hence that all may ultimately derive from a single source. And as we have also noted, Parhat has made a credible argument that — at least for some of the assertions — the common source is the Chinese government, which may be less than objective with respect to the Uighurs.

Despite their claims to be afraid of Big Government, wingnuts have a scary belief that government can be trusted without question and that's the rationale Sen. Kit Bond offered in defense of the telcoms.