Last week, I took part in a panel on legal blogging at the D.C. Circuit’s judicial conference. One of the issues our panel addressed was how to sort out which online voices can be trusted and which can’t. Unfortunately, one of my fellow panelists, Dahlia Lithwick, in her Slate essay on yesterday’s Boumediene ruling, has provided further evidence that she falls squarely in the latter category. (Enter the search term “Lithwick” here for plenty of other examples.)

One elementary feature of fair debate is to present accurately the position and arguments you are contesting. Consider how Lithwick does on that score in discussing Justice Scalia’s dissent.

In his dissent, Scalia discusses the “disastrous consequences” of the majority’s ruling separately from his account of its legal errors. Among other things, he notes that at least 30 prisoners that the military had released from Guantanamo Bay have “returned to the battlefield,” and that some have “succeeded in carrying on their atrocities against innocent civilians” and against soldiers allied with the U.S. As Scalia puts it, “Their return to the kill illustrates the incredible difficulty of assessing who is and who is not an enemy combatant in a foreign theater of operations where the environment does not lend itself to rigorous evidence collection.” Further, the rules vaguely contemplated by the majority “will be more detainee-friendly than those now applied, since otherwise there would be no reason to hold the congressionally prescribed procedures unconstitutional.” Thus, “the number of the enemy returned to combat will obviously increase” over what current military procedures would yield.

Here’s how Lithwick summarizes this part of Scalia’s argument: “So you see, even those who were deemed innocent at Guantanamo are actually guilty in Scalia’s mind.” And: “Just to recap [Scalia’s position], then, everyone at Guantanamo is guilty.” Set aside the sloppiness of Lithwick’s use of “guilty” and “innocent” as substitutes for being an enemy combatant or not. There is nothing in Scalia’s opinion that indicates that he believes that “everyone at Guantanamo” is an enemy combatant. His explicit, impossible-to-miss point, rather, is the “incredible difficulty of assessing who is and who is not an enemy combatant”—and the inevitable cost of “more detainee-friendly” procedures. There may well be grounds for taking issue with Scalia, but misstating his position isn’t a proper way.

Lithwick’s next paragraph begins, “The claim that the majority handed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the others at Guantanamo the keys to the cells is absurd on its face.” In context, a trusting reader would assume that Scalia made this claim. In fact, neither he nor any of the other dissenting justices does so. Rather, they make the very different complaint—incompatible with Lithwick’s straw man—that the majority has failed even to spell out the standards and procedures that should govern detainees’ habeas petitions.

Another elementary feature of fair debate is to acknowledge and correct your errors openly and promptly. Lithwick has failed on that score in the past. Let’s see how she does this time.

(I will place in the separate realm of misguided—rather than patently unfair or incompetent—commentary Lithwick’s argument that the real divide between the majority and the dissenters lies in the different risks they focus on: the majority’s worry “about the very real risk of a lifetime of mistaken imprisonment” versus the dissenters’ supposed worry that habeas review “may—somewhere far down the line, and at the moment entirely hypothetically—result in the release of a detainee or (more attenuated still) the disclosure of a piece of hypothetical information that could help the terrorists in their fight against us.” Congress did not weigh the relative risks the way Lithwick apparently does (and I wouldn’t think that any sensible American would), and the dissenters’ legal argument—as distinct from their discussion of the “disastrous consequences” of the majority’s ruling—is that the Court had no authority to override Congress’s judgment.)