So the Senate should not consider this man (or anyone else Bush nominates for any position requiring confirmation) at all.

If they did that, then the very loyal Paul Clement would remain as Acting AG for the remainder of the Bush presidency. I suspect the White House would be very happy with that outcome and hopes that the Senate Democrats follow your advice.

One would think that his insistence on paying attention to actual facts in the Padilla case would disqualify him from the part of the AG job description that involves overseeing the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Well this is going to be interesting. The Journal of Neuroscience is publishing science right now claiming that the active ingredients in marijuana can stop prions from wreaking their havoc upon the brain. Right now there is no treatment for prion infection. This is really major.

If AG Mukasey decides that peer-reviewed, scientific publication constitutes a "fact" then the DEA is in really big trouble!!!

Maybe the days of categorizing marijuana as officially medically useless are coming to an end?

But never underestimate the power of politics to destroy information.

It's not very likely that any facts about marijuana established by science are ever going to be the driving force in American marijuana policy.

I don't really have any hope for a Democratic administration on that score either.

I think we can judge the way medical marijuana science is going to be treated by a Democratic Attorney General by looking at the way medical marijuana science is being covered by Salon.

In other words, it's hopeless. It's just hopeless. The DEA has too much political power for any political process to ever interrupt.

But this begs the question. Is someone who tries to perpetrate terrorist acts inside the U.S. on behalf of Al Qaeda a prisoner of war?

No, it doesn't beg the question, it throws it into sharp relief: Being at war with al Qaeda (or, as some have proposed, with "terrorism") leads directly to the logical paradox that wars are finite and a war with al Qaeda or terrorism is not, making the term "duration of conflict" suddenly indeterminate and ill-defined. So it isn't a war. Which means that someone who does that is not a prisoner of war, s/he is a criminal, and we have a court system to deal with criminals. Which also means that we can't be sustaining an "existential threat" unless we believe that being sacked by criminals is imminent.

I'm a math guy, so I have no problem with the tachyon argument: if defining an entity or behavior leads logically to an empirical impossibility, then the entity or behavior doesn't exist. Lawyers may feel differently, but this argues for what I heard Helen Stacy once call the "Lord Goldsmith solution" -- that international terrorism is a crime, not an act of war.

Here's a way to rephrase your question which makes perfect sense to me: Did we have the right to hold Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols without trial, to torture and interrogate them, and to keep them indefinitely until all David Koresh admirers were no longer capable of plotting bombings? Were we at war with them? Were they prisoners of war? After all, they weren't a possible threat, they were a profoundly imminent and executed threat.

No, it doesn't beg the question, it throws it into sharp relief: Being at war with al Qaeda (or, as some have proposed, with "terrorism") leads directly to the logical paradox that wars are finite and a war with al Qaeda or terrorism is not, making the term "duration of conflict" suddenly indeterminate and ill-defined. So it isn't a war. Which means that someone who does that is not a prisoner of war, s/he is a criminal, and we have a court system to deal with criminals.

So is it your view that "wars" can only be with nation-states? If Al Qaeda acquired fighter jets and tanks and army divisions and began sorties runs over American cities and targeted invasions of the U.S. with tanks, you still wouldn't consider that at a "war"? That would just be run-of-the-mill criminal acts, and it could never become a "war" no matter how militarized and organized their attacks became because they are not a nation-state?

Here's a way to rephrase your question which makes perfect sense to me: Did we have the right to hold Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols without trial, to torture and interrogate them, and to keep them indefinitely until all David Koresh admirers were no longer capable of plotting bombings? Were we at war with them? Were they prisoners of war? After all, they weren't a possible threat, they were a profoundly imminent and executed threat.

That was just one attack. How about if there were 10,000 Timothy McVeigh's and hundreds of Oaklahoma City bombings? Wouldn't that begin to resemble the Civil War more than an isolated criminal act?

I'm not at all convinced that just because it's a "war," it means you can hold people forever with no process - and I obviously don't think you can torture them no matter what you call it. So I place less importance on this semantic question than you seem to. Still, I'm curious about this bright line you're drawaing - it would seem to prevent the use of the term "war" for situations that resemble "war" in every meaningful way.

Bravo. You try to put the issue of terrorism in its proper perspective, which no one else but Glenn and the folks over at Balkinization seem to have considered worth doing.

Even if all the Islamists who hate us, for whatever reason, were acting in concert -- which is highly doubtful, in my opinion -- it seems to me that their crimes would fit better into the category of international criminal conspiracy than acts of war. If the U.S. cosa nostra hires a Sicilian mafia hit man, do we bomb Sicily -- or worse yet, Tuscany -- and send the New Jersey godfather to be interrogated in a Polish prison, or lock him up forever in Guantánamo?

War, it seems to me, really is the province of nation states. If we could prove that a particular state was behind the actions of the 9/11 pilots, or the Lockerbie bombers, then I think it would be proper to detain those working in concert with them as prisoners of war, and to consider ourselves at war with the states which sponsored them. Absent that proof, what we have is clever and daring criminals who hate us, and treating them as criminals, with the due process accorded criminals under existing U.S. law seems appropriate.