Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s rules on a Guantanamo detainee named Fouad al-Rabiah who filed a habeas petition. The short version:

Al Rabiah’s uncorroborated confessions are not reliable or credible, and that the Government has failed to provide the Court with sufficiently credible and reliable evidence to meet its burden of persuasion. If there exists a basis for Al Rabiah’s indefinite detention, it most certainly has not been presented to this Court.

 Lizardbreath observes:

 If I follow the course of events correctly through all the redactions [within the decision], we then continued to torture him because the story we told him to confess to didn’t make any sense. And now we’ve asked a judge to keep him imprisoned on the basis of the confessions that the US interrogators found unbelievable.

Kollar-Kotelly was chief presiding judge of the FISA Court for seven years, so it’s not like she’s unattentive to intelligence concerns. Indeed, she might be the most qualified judges on the bench to consider al-Rabiah’s petition. 

Imagine what it’s like to be in al-Rabiah’s position — tortured into a senseless confession, and then further tortured to make the story clearer, with his tormentors asserting he should never have any redress his entire life long, even after interrogators find his information useless. It’s a closed loop of injustice, in which initial errors are simply justification for compounding them. I never want to hear anyone who would excuse this treatment braying that the crucible of liberty is the difference of a few percentage points in the 30s in a top marginal tax bracket.