The public sector and the private.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

LAST SUMMER, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of rulings on the "enemy combatants" cooling their heels at Guantanamo Bay and in military custody within the United States, civil libertarians mostly hailed the decisions as a victory for all that is admirable about the American justice system. The Los Angeles Times announced that Rasul v. Bush, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld v. Padilla proved "the rule of law stands above the commander in chief, even in times of war and national emergency." In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that on reason online, I crowed, "There seems little doubt that [the rulings] are good for civil liberties."

Harvey Silverglate challenges such sunny evaluations in this month's cover stow, "Civil Liberties and Enemy Combatants" (page 22). A practicing lawyer who cut his teeth defending draft resisters during the Vietnam War, Silverglate is personally familiar with the way the government routinely stacks the deck against defendants. Each of the Supreme Court's enemy combatant decisions, he warns, "included enough qualifications and concessions to eviscerate in practice the due process rights that the justices praised in theory.... Observers will likely marvel for a long time at how the Supreme Court's noble-sounding rhetoric turned out to have so little influence on the government's actual conduct."

Another story in this issue zeroes in on a different sort of governmental flimflammery. In "Cut-Rate Diplomas" (page 38), Paul Sperry tells the tale of "Dr." Laura L. Callahan, who held important posts at the Departments of Labor and Homeland Security until...