Like so many others, I stopped watching about halfway through the third quarter and went to bed, so I missed the Celtics come roaring back to win the game, and take a 3-1 lead in the NBA finals.

I have been critical from the beginning of the way in which the Bush Administration has sought to deal with people captured during the so-called "War on Terror". After 9/11 I advocated a congressional declaration of war, for a lot of reasons, but primarily to bring Congress into the decision to go to war in an unambiguous fashion. One of the other advantages of such a declaration would have been on the legal side, creating some structure for dealing with captives. It would have been imperfect, but at least it might possibly have prevented some of the trouble we now face. That trouble is perfectly encapsulated in the Supreme Court's recent ruling about the rights of the detainees. Without a declaration of war, it is easier to believe that these terrorists are simply criminals and, therefore, entitled to the same rights as others who are accused in the criminal justice system. With a declaration of war, they would have been POWs, entitled to some of the rights of POWs, but not all, as most of the detainees were not uniformed members of a recognizable nation-state. I'm not a lawyer, but I think it would have been a little easier on everyone if we had brought Congress in from the beginning. Now, alas, many members, and people of like mind, whether in the citizenry at large or on the highest court, can hold the belief that we are not engaged in a war and, as soon as George W. Bush is removed from the scene, we can return to peacetime. Justice Scalia, writing in dissent, said that he believes Americans will die because of this decision, and he is probably correct. Worse still will be the consequences of an Obama Administration, which I believe is coming in January of 2009. George W. Bush will be remembered by history not for the malfeasance his contemporary critics assign to him (Bush Lied, People Died) but, rather, for the mistakes he made when he chose correctly to call for war after 9/11, but failed miserably to follow through on the logical consequences of his decision (mobilizing the public through a call for volunteers, or the establishment of some kind of national service, expanding the military, engaging a crash program to achieve energy independence, etc.). America will pay for those mistakes most dearly in the years to come.