While the Bush Administration has, from time to time, done things which are – ahem – ethically questionable, it has usually made at least a half-hearted attempt to cover them with a veneer of legality.
           Occasionally, however, it will throw aside any such pretensions. Take Sami Al-Arian, a man who should never have been imprisoned in the first place, who has spent the last five years in jail under conditions decried by Amnesty International as “gratuitously punitive,” whose prison term ended on April 11th, and who is nevertheless still being held behind bars.