WASHINGTON >> After a judge ordered a Guantanamo Bay prisoner freed because the evidence that he was an al-Qaida member was too thin, the government appealed the ruling to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. But as the detainee’s lawyers prepared to argue the case in January 2011, they had reason to hope that they might prevail again.

For one thing, the government had dropped several of its arguments for why their client was probably a wartime enemy, further weakening its case that he was not the innocent he claimed to be. For another, the three-judge panel included one of the appeals court’s few Democratic appointees, Merrick B. Garland, who is now a Supreme Court nominee.

But just 22 seconds after one of the detainee’s lawyers began arguing that only “tattered remnants” remained of the government’s case against his client, Garland interrupted him. “Just because they had really strong arguments that they are not now using doesn’t mean the ones that are left are not pretty strong,” he declared.

Garland’s panel went on to rule that the government’s evidence was good enough to keep holding the man after all. The judge’s vote was part of a pattern: As one wartime detention case after another has pitted state security powers against individual rights, he has often — though not always — deferred to the government.

That pattern is part of the reason Garland is seen as a moderate, an image that serves as ammunition as President Barack Obama tries to shame Republican senators who say they will not even give him a hearing. It is also the reason lawyers who have represented Guantanamo Bay detainees — and some liberals for whom Guantanamo is a core issue — have had a mixed reaction to the choice.

Garland — a former prosecutor who oversaw the investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing before President Bill Clinton appointed him to the bench — was assigned in late 2002 to the first appellate panel that reviewed a Guantanamo detainee lawsuit. The administration of President George W. Bush had brought the first Afghanistan war prisoners to the U.S. military base in Cuba early that year.

In that case, Garland and two Republican-appointed judges agreed in 2003 with the Bush administration that federal courts had no jurisdiction to hear such cases, dismissing the lawsuit. The Supreme Court later overturned their decision.

Thomas B. Wilner, one of the lawyers who brought that case, recalled being disappointed by Garland’s ruling. But, echoing several other detainee lawyers, he also said he has known the judge for decades and respects him as fair-minded.

“Everyone has predilections, but he tries to decide things fairly and not based on ideology,” Wilner said. “I wouldn’t call him pro-government. He certainly is concerned about these things and listens to the government’s arguments very seriously and is inclined to give them weight.”

In his next Guantanamo case, Garland did rule against the government. In 2008, he was part of a panel that rejected a military tribunal’s decision that a certain detainee was an “enemy combatant,” and so lawfully detainable. The tribunal had made that decision even though the government had refused to show it or the court secret evidence for its claims.

“To affirm the Tribunal’s determination under such circumstances would be to place a judicial imprimatur on an act of essentially unreviewable executive discretion,” Garland wrote.

But that 2008 ruling was an outlier.

From 2010 to 2012, the appeals court systematically turned back habeas corpus cases brought by detainees, instructing lower-court judges to use more government-friendly standards for interpreting ambiguous evidence. Garland was not on the panels that developed the early key precedents, but he embraced and applied them without objection.

Among the detainees he voted to permit the government to keep in prison were a Kuwaiti, three Afghans and five Yemenis. In 2012, for example, he wrote an opinion upholding the detention of a Yemeni, noting that “our” appeals court precedents foreclosed all of the legal arguments the detainee’s lawyer was making.

Garland was hardly alone: No detainee won a release order at the appeals court level. Still, he voted differently from the other two Democratic appointees who were on the court at the time, David S. Tatel and Judith Ann Wilson Rogers, in a 2011 case.

That was an appeal to the full court of a panel ruling that detainees could not challenge government decisions to transfer them to a country where the detainees believed they would be in danger. Garland was part of the majority, which declined to rehear the case. Tatel and Rogers joined a dissent.

And in 2011, Tatel dissented from a panel decision that reversed yet another district court judge’s order to free a detainee. He lamented that the appeals court was giving too much credence to questionable government claims. Garland wrote no equivalent dissent in the cases that came before him.

Indeed, in a 2011 case of his own, Garland wrote an opinion upholding the detention of an Afghan based on evidence the government was keeping secret at the time from the detainee’s lawyers, although judges saw it. But the government appears to have since changed its mind about the credibility of that evidence.

Court documents show that the government later provided unspecified information to the Afghan’s legal team, which used it to ask a district court judge to reopen the case. The government then voluntarily repatriated the Afghan. But his lawyers are still asking the judge to rule that their client had never been lawfully detainable in the first place to “correct a substantial injustice” related to the previously withheld information.

J. Wells Dixon, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights who is helping to represent the Afghan, said that Garland “has been too deferential to the government,” calling the secret-evidence case “particularly troubling.”

Fallout from the appeals court’s skeptical approach to habeas cases led to one more notable ruling. It started when a Yemeni detainee killed himself. A district court judge had ordered him freed, but the appeals court reversed that ruling. (Garland was not on that panel.)

After concluding that the detainee had overdosed on pills hoarded in his underwear, the military began requiring guards to search detainees’ groins for contraband whenever the prisoners left their cells.

To avoid the indignity, some detainees stopped going to meetings with their lawyers, and a judge ordered that the practice be halted. But an appellate panel overturned his ruling, calling the practice reasonable.

That panel included Garland.

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