In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision earlier this month, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has now decided that the Bush administration was wrong to label Gitmo detainee Huzaifa Parhat an “enemy combatant.” The Court of Appeals decided that Parhat should be released, transferred to another country, or granted another tribunal session.

Predictably, the decision has been celebrated by critics of the Bush administration and the Guantánamo detention facility. They have cited the decision as further evidence of the unjustness of America’s detention policies. And some, including the editors of the New York Times, have highlighted Parhat’s own “insistence that he was an innocent swept up in the chaos in Afghanistan.”