"Isn't the main issue," Justice John Paul Stevens plaintively asked, "the fact that it has taken six years" to resolve the question whether alien enemy combatants "have been unlawfully detained" at Guantánamo Bay?

The American Civil Liberties Union's Steven Shapiro is one of the best lawyers in the United States. Still, he was flat wrong when he told the New York Times that a federal appeals court's July 6 dismissal of the ACLU's challenge to the Bush administration's now-defunct Terrorist Surveillance…