Justice Scalia's dissents nearly always are a pleasure to read, even when they border on sheer fantasy. Boumediene, though, seems to have pushed him over the edge. This dissent is more like a tantrum.

It's hard to convey just how mad he is. You really need to read it for yourself to get a complete picture, but the part about the majority killing Americans is just the tip of the iceberg.

For instance, Ms. Lithwick omits that he's still really, really unhappy about Hamdan, a decision he characterizes, two years later, as "quite amazing[]." Yet his displeasure with that decision, expressed repeatedly and vehemently, is merely the foundation on which he constructs the real structure of his diatribe.

The gist is as follows: "Don't you idiots get that we're at war here!" He gets remarkably specific in explaining this (I'm cutting out the citations to make it more readable):

"America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in Lebanon, 19 at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, 224 at our embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen. On September 11, 2001, the enemy brought the battle to American soil, killing 2,749 at the Twin Towers in New York City, 184 at the Pentagon in Washington, D. C., and 40 in Pennsylvania. It has threatened further attacks against our homeland; one need only walk about buttressed and barricaded Washington, or board a plane anywhere in the country, to know that the threat is a serious one. Our Armed Forces are now in the field against the enemy, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last week, 13 of our countrymen in arms were killed."

That's barely the beginning - he recites nearly every known incident of Islamic terrorist activity against U.S. citizens; lays out every actual and potential negative consequence of allowing detainees even a tiny bit more due process; and accepts without question all possible bad outcomes. In the process he heaps ridicule on the majority - saying they were "just kidding," describing them as unable to "resist striking a pose of faux deference" to the other branches; and arguing that they "blunder[] in" to question the judgment of the President.

Scalia also cites a legal memo prepared for the President by John Yoo (of all people) and the minority committee report on a piece of legislation that hasn't passed yet. These both are acts of legal desperation - neither has any legal bearing at all and the notion of Antonin Scalia, that scourge of legislative history, quoting a minority report from a commitee on a bill that hasn't even been passed by Congress, is almost incredible.

Taken together, it's quite stunning at first. And then I figured it out - Scalia is scared. He is, bluntly, frightened to death of those men at Guantanamo and their real and imagined cohorts in the Islamic world. That fear permeates the whole dissent, and gives the prisoners in Guantanamo frightful power: They could be let free and kill Americans; they could use the information they get in their hearings as intelligence to guide further terrorist actions; they could undermine democracy, truth and justice.

It's true that even at his most compassionate, Scalia doesn't have much sympathy for people who are accused of bad acts. It's also true that he is a very strong supporter of executive power generally. And this decision certainly goes against his views in both of these areas. But he's been on the losing side before, and his dissents have been churlish and cutting, yet still under control. This one is different, and when I read it, I smell fear.