Dahlia Lithwick maintains her admirable and relentless dissection of the terrible abuse of power and the constitution in the Padilla case, one of the most important cases in the history of American liberty. Money quote:
This is why the White House yanked Padilla from the brig to the high court to the federal courts and back to a Florida trial court: They were only forum shopping for the best place to enshrine the right to detain him indefinitely. Their claims about Padilla’s dirty bomb, known to be false, were a means of advancing their larger claims about executive power. And when confronted with the possibility of losing on those claims, they yanked him back to the criminal courts as a way to avoid losing powers they’d already won.
The right to detain him indefinitely. It’s as good a definition of creeping tyranny as any we have.
The Dish 