Federal appeals judges criticize the handling of "enemy combatant" cases

Today's Washington Post tells us:

In reversing a military tribunal's determination that a Chinese detainee was an "enemy combatant," a federal appeals court criticized the government's evidence and compared its legal theories to a nonsensical 19th-century poem.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit wrote in a 39-page opinion released yesterday that tribunals and courts must be able to assess whether evidence is reliable before determining the fate of detainees.

That did not happen in the case of Huzaifa Parhat, a Chinese Uighur determined to be an enemy combatant by a tribunal that relied heavily on questionable evidence in classified documents, the appeals court found.

The ruling, the first successful appeal of a detainee's designation as an enemy combatant, ordered the government to release, transfer or hold a new hearing for Parhat. The opinion was issued on June 20 and was declassified and released yesterday.

The opinion could have broad implications for scores of other detainees classified as enemy combatants by Combatant Status Review Tribunals. The opinion is also likely to guide federal judges weighing evidence in up-coming hearings.

[etc.]

Finally.

We are finally seeing some pushback against the Bush administration's unreasonable handling of detainees who may or may not be guilty of any terrorist acts or terrorist connections.

I'm not soft on crime, and I'm not soft on terrorists. I want to see the bad guys punished. But I'm tired of hearing of so many cases of innocent people, sold to U.S. troops by bounty hunters or arrested and detained on a translation error, who are trapped in legal limbo and at the mercy of Gitmo's kangaroo court system.

Now, finally, fortunately, it appears that the wheels might be in motion to move us towards true justice, or something closer to it, in this thing Bush calls the "war on terror".