Jack says:

the political branches are best positioned to decide the hard liberty and security tradeoffs that the system tries to guarantee. They are best positioned because they have more information about the risks of terrorism, weighed against the risk of being too aggressive against terrorism, and because they face the electorate if they get that tradeoff wrong.

He's correct, but the political branches are ill suited to determine whether any indvividual is dangerous. So far, the politicians have decided to assume that anyone captured and called a terrorist is in fact a terrorist. That's why we need the courts to have a role. Is it ethical to lock up people forever, giving them no opportunity to prove they are not dangerous? One would have thought that "extra judicial punishment" was the province of the Soviet Gulag and Sadaam Hussein and his ilk, not "the land of the free."

Whether more lenient standards for detention should apply for alleged enemy combatants than for alleged unibombers or bank robbers is an interesting question, but so far the Administration and a compliant Congress have created a system with essentially no standards and provide no meaningful rights to the accused. The courts keep pushing for some modicum of due process, as they should.