I have a column up this afternoon on the ongoing terrorism investigation which has been linked to Denver because that’s where one of the main suspects lives — based on what’s been reported so far, it would be better to think of the case as an al-Qaeda plot to conduct multiple attacks in New York City. In any event, in the column I argue, yet again, that it is a mistake to attack international terrorism as if it were a criminal-justice problem and endeavor to show how the ongoing case illustrates this folly. We need an administrative detention law that permits law enforcement to arrest and detain suspects in national-security cases even if agents are not yet in a position to file terrorism charges.

On this point, note that of the three suspects currently under arrest — not for terrorism offenses but, so far, just for making false statements during interrogation — one has already had his bail hearing and has been detained. No one gets detained pretrial for lying to the FBI . . . and if they did, that would be a strong reason not to speak to the FBI post-arrest, which is not something the FBI wants to encourage.

No, this guy (and no doubt his co-defendants, who will also be appearing in court today) is being detained not because of what he’s been charged with but because he’s suspected of involvement in terrorism that the government is not yet in a position to prove. That’s the same reason why the Justice Department detained people under the immigration laws and as “material witnesses” after 9/11. It gave us a legal hook to do what the law otherwise forbids: to detain people as to whom there was insufficient evidence to file criminal charges while agents scrambled to figure out what role, if any, those people might have in jihadist plots against the U.S.

The honest way to do this is to adopt a form of the administrative detention system other countries use for national-security threats. That way, the government could hold everybody who was reasonably suspected in a mass-murder plot rather than just those against whom it can currently scrape together evidence of some crime — any crime — while the other plotters stay at liberty, destroy evidence, and flee.