One of the most important judicial tribunals in America, and one whose handiwork has come to be reversed with numbing regularity by the U.S. Supreme Court, has once again dealt a body blow to government's vital efforts to combat terrorism. The case, decided December 3, is Humanitarian Law Project v. United States Department of Justice. In it, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit confronted, for the second time in the litigation, a Clinton-era anti-terrorism law (18 U.S.C. § 2339B) enacted in 1996 — after militant Islamic extremists strung together the deadly 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a...
