‘Snark’ informs federal rebuke
A federal appeals court reviewing evidence at Guantanamo Bay compared a Bush administration legal argument to one made by a hapless character in a 19th century nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit cited the 1876 poem “The Hunting of the Snark” in ruling that the military had improperly labeled a Chinese Muslim as an enemy combatant. The ruling was issued last week but an unclassified version of the opinion was not released until now.
The three-member court, made up of two Republican judges and one Democrat, compared the argument to the logic in Carroll’s nonsense poem, in which a hapless crew hunts for a creature that is never quite defined. The Bellman, the ship’s leader, leads his men across the ocean, guided by a map that is just a blank piece of paper. He rallies and reassures his crew simply by repeating himself.
“I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true,” the Bellman says in the poem.
“Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has ‘said it thrice’ does not make an allegation true,” the court wrote.
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