The New York Times Calls Lawfare "Invaluable"

At least, Adam Liptak does in a well-worth-reading column about Latif. Take that, editorial staff! On a more serious note, here's the money quote:

Latif is the next great Guantánamo case--whether the Supreme Court agrees to hear it or not. As things stand now, Judge Tatel wrote, “it is hard to see what is left of the Supreme Court’s command in Boumediene.” If the justices agree to hear the Latif case, they can explain whether their Guantánamo decisions were theoretical tussles about the scope of executive power fit for a law school seminar or whether they were meant to have practical consequences for actual prisoners. If the Supreme Court turns down the case, it will be signaling that it has given up on Guantánamo. That would effectively outsource judicial supervision of the prison camp there to the federal appeals court here, which includes some judges who do not bother to hide their hostility to the Supreme Court.

I would formulate this point differently, less pejoratively, but I largely agree with it. Latif--and, for that matter, Uthman and Almerfedi--individually and collectively present the high court in a way that earlier cases did not with the question of what it really meant when it decided Boumediene. Was the decision asking for a detailed, granular review of evidence? Or was it asking for something more like judicial review in the administrative law context--a judge's eye on the basic integrity of executive processes. There is language in the court's work that will support a huge range of possibility. These cases either require the justices, for the first time, to decide where they sit on that spectrum or they subcontract that decision to the D.C. Circuit.