When do you know?

Ruth Wedgwood, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, presents an interesting argument in favor of the Bush administration’s detention of alleged Al Qaeda member Jose Padilla. Boils down to “By the logic of last week’s [apellate court] decision, the president could not have held the hijackers as combatants–even after they had entered the United States, even with habeas corpus review of the president’s decision, until the moment they appeared at Logan Airport with box cutters.”