Larisa Alexandrovna - In the continued saga of the Bush administration's war crimes (an apparently no interest by Congress to hold anyone accountable), officials attempted to convince a federal appeals court that Puff the Magic Dragon was a solid source of information:

"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."

Perilously close? Has it not been already so for many years now?

This article was first published at Largely