Michael Mukasey last night, before the fall:

As the end of this Administration draws near, you would expect to hear broad praise for this success at keeping our Nation safe. Instead, I am afraid what we hear is a chorus with a rather more dissonant refrain. Instead of appreciation, or even a fair appraisal, of the Administration’s accomplishments, we have heard relentless criticism of the very policies that have helped keep us safe. We have seen this in the media, we have seen this in the Congress, and we have heard it from the legal academy as well.
In some measure, those criticisms rest on a very dangerous form of amnesia that views the success of our counterterrorism efforts as something that undermines the justification for continuing them. In an odd way, we have become victims of our own success. In the eyes of these critics, if Al Qaeda has not struck our homeland for seven years, then perhaps it never posed much of a threat after all and we didn’t need these counterterrorism policies.
Other critics question the premise—almost universally accepted following the September 11th attacks —that the United States is engaged in a war against Al Qaeda and other groups. Even more common is the casual assumption among many in media, political, and legal circles that the Administration’s counterterrorism policies have come at the expense of the rule of law. I am quite familiar with these criticisms, having heard them myself during my tenure as Attorney General.
Now it is hardly surprising that the questions of how we confront the terrorism threat should generate vigorous debate. These questions are among the most complex and consequential that a democratic government can face. There is, understandably, passionate debate about where the legal lines are drawn in this new and very difficult conflict and, as a matter of policy, how close to those legal lines we should go.
As the members of this Society know, however, answering legal questions often involves a close reading and a critical analysis of a text—the Constitution, statutes, judicial decisions, and the like. Regrettably, this point is much too often lost in the public discourse on the subject. Newspapers, commentators, and even prominent lawyers often discuss critical questions about national security policies with barely any acknowledgement that the answers may depend on the language of, say, the Constitution or a statute. And critics of this Administration’s policies rarely draw distinctions between whether a course of action is permitted as a matter of law, and whether that course of action is prudent as a matter of policy.

Read it all here.