State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley wrote the following on his Twitter page early this morning:

The claim by the lawyer for #JulianAssange that his client could go to #Guantanamo is pure legal fantasy. Save it for the movie.

Crowley is right. As I've written previously, it is a pure fantasy. But lawyers for jihadists make similarly outrageous claims all the time. For example, lawyers for current and former Guantanamo detainees have claimed that their clients have suffered everything from being injected with the HIV virus to being deliberately humiliated simply because they are Muslim. The word "Nazi" is used by lawyers for the detainees to describe American servicemen with disturbing frequency.

In other words, lawyers make things up with respect to their clients all the time. The claim by Assange's lawyer drew a sharp rebuttal. Unfortunately, going back to the days of the Bush administration, the same cannot be said for most of the bizarre and unsupported allegations thrown about with respect to Guantanamo.

Thomas Joscelyn is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.