People v. Bandersnatch
Political life has never been short on absurdity. It doesn’t usually get quite this explicit, though. The AP reports today that the DC Circuit Court’s recent ruling on Guantanamo quoted from Lewis Carroll (he of Alice in Wonderland), who knew a thing or three about absurdity.*
According to the AP story:
As for the reliability of the evidence, the court writes, “The government insists that the statements made in the documents are reliable because the State and Defense Departments would not have put them in intelligence documents were that not the case,” the court wrote. “This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true.”
The judges compared the argument to the Bellman’s nonsense in “The Hunting of the Snark,” in which a crew hunts for a creature that is never defined. The Bellman, the ship’s leader, led his men across the ocean, guided by a map that was just a blank piece of paper. He rallied and reassured his crew simply by repeating himself. “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true,” the Bellman says.
“Lewis Carroll notwithstanding,” the court wrote, “the fact that the government has ’said it thrice’ does not make an allegation true.”
Now if the administration would just get that through their heads about the rest of their conduct…
The DC Circuit Court, for its part, will next decide whether to hear a fiercely contested case between the Big Endians and Little Endians.
Postscript: The Wall Street Journal’s law blog has another take on the ruling here.
Tags: absurdity, detainees, Guantanamo, Lewis Carroll, poetry