Indefinite detention and WMD

How you feel about the indefinite military detentions of Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla will turn largely on what you think life will look like when it starts. By "it," I mean the moment at which fundamental liberties are curtailed by well-meaning governments and the legal system becomes unable to offer relief.

The official inside debate, in other words, is whether to build new nuclear weapons that are more usable in modern warfare or whether to do that and make the old nuclear weapons more usable, too. A broader debate—over whether to go down this twisted road generally—has not yet begun.