On Tuesday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stinging rebuke to a district court that granted a Guantanamo detainee’s habeas petition last year. The detainee in question is Mohammed al-Adahi, a Yemeni whom District Judge Gladys Kessler ordered freed in August 2009.

The circuit court said that Judge Kessler’s opinion is “incomprehensible,” “perplexing,” clearly “wrong,” “manifestly incorrect,” “startling,” “simply not a ‘permissible view…of the evidence,’” and was reached “through a series of legal errors.”