Here Comes The Crunch

The US Supreme Court has rejected FBI linguist Siebel Edmond's appeal:

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton dismissed the case after then-Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the rarely used "state secrets privilege."

He warned that further disclosure of the duties of Edmonds and other translators could cause "serious damage to the national security interests of the United States."

The judge on the case, Reggie Walton, is a Bush appointee who is also handling the Libby case.

This comes just a week after the Jose Padilla case was side-tracked to avoid a legal showdown:

"We take each individual, each case, case by case," Gonzales said.

The upshot of that approach, underscored by the decision in Padilla's case, is that no one outside the administration knows just how the determination is made: whether to handle a terror suspect as an enemy combatant or as a common criminal, to hold him indefinitely without charges in a military facility or to charge him in court.

Indeed, citing the need to combat terrorism, the administration has argued, with varying degrees of success, that judges should have essentially no role in reviewing its decisions.

The change in Padilla's status, just days before the government's legal papers were due in his appeal to the Supreme Court, suggested to many legal observers that the administration wanted to keep the court out of the case.

"The position of the executive branch," said Eric Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University who has consulted with lawyers for several detainees, "is that it can be judge, jury and executioner."

Be afraid. The crunch is coming. It could be nasty...