Writing for the editors, David Tell of The Weekly Standard again probes the atmosphere of “Civil Hysteria” in this country, particularly as it pertains to issues of detention and civil liberties:

[…] as we read the Justice Department’s filings in [Yasser] Hamdi’s ongoing habeas corpus proceedings, it simply isn’t true — as nearly every editorial page would have it — that our government is claiming unilateral, absolute power to call people ‘enemy combatants’ and lock them up for the rest of time [Hamdi, you’ll recall, is ‘the U.S. citizen taken prisoner with his Taliban unit in Afghanistan, who is now being held — without criminal charge — in a Norfolk, Virginia, Navy brig’]. In fact, in the Hamdi case itself, the government has already offered for judicial review a sealed submission that Chief Judge Harvie Wilkinson of the Fourth Circuit says ‘specifically delineates the manner in which the military assesses and screens enemy combatants to determine who among them should be brought under Department of Defense control’ and further ‘describes how the military determined that petitioner Hamdi fit the eligibility requirements applied to enemy combatants for detention.’ What’s more, Justice Department lawyers have themselves acknowledged, by reference to Supreme Court precedents which suggest as much explicitly, that the judiciary may ‘call upon the executive to provide “some evidence” supporting [enemy combatant] determination[s]’ — and may also, by logical extension, invalidate such determinations if it turns out the evidence is wholly insubstantial.

How on earth does any of this constitute an outrage against American civil liberties, much less a ‘departure…from centuries of Anglo-American jurisprudence’ [as the National Post’s Stuart Taylor Jr. would have it]? And why — given that the executive branch, dispassionately observed, has neither proposed nor claimed authority nor otherwise shown the slightest willingness to pursue the war on terrorism with wild, extra-legal abandon — are so many smart people among us nevertheless disposed to regard the U.S. government as a dangerous, snarling beast?

Why, indeed…?

Tell has shown real sobriety on these issues — affecting a measured intellectual position that has not been without its criticisms of the Bush administration — and for my money, he articulates the kind of reasoned stance vis-a-vis Justice Department activities I’d like to see more in the media emulate.

[Related: “On Ashcroft, Liberty, and the Police State,” and “The Specter of Terrorism“]

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