Congrats to the Bush Administration, for waiting a month after arresting the "dirty bomb" suspect before publicly announcing its achievement (from Moscow, no less). Good job, boys.

That whole story is starting to smell like a damp carpet. It now appears that in spite of having nothing stronger against Mr. Padilla than the fact that he was in the initial "planning" stages, the Justice Department has no plans to set up a military tribunal or try the S.O.B. in Federal Court. I know I am going to hear that "there's a war going on", but donnez moi une break; under the Ashcroft doctrine, the state could begin detaining patrons inside a tavern, because of the potential threat that they may drive home with a buzz and kill somebody (after all, far more people were killed in D.U.I.'s last year than in suicide airplane hijackings). Yes, Lincoln did suspend habeus corpus during the Civil War (something for which neither history nor his contemporaries treated him kindly), but in that case, our national existence was in peril, a potentiality which is nowhere near close to happening now, no matter what sort of dirty bombs go off.
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