denouncing 'the Boumediene Five'. The Wall Street Journal bellowed in an editorial that the majority justices had signed the death warrants of American soldiers fighting terror overseas. At a town hall meeting in Pemberton, N.J., McCain called it "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country". For his part Obama reiterated his "firm belief that we can track terrorists, we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our constitution".

Then, last Monday, a three-judge federal court in Washington followed swiftly in the tracks of the June 12 ruling, declaring that Hozaifa Parhat, a 33-year-old Uighur Muslim from the oppressed Xinjiang province of China, seized in Turkmenistan in 2001, had the right to seek release immediately through a writ of habeas corpus. Thus, in the space of less than a fortnight, the US courts kicked away what Bush and his lawyers have insisted for seven years to be the vital need to hold terrorists indefinitely, without

charges or rights of any sort.

Judges mostly rule in tune with the temper of the times, and the decisions this month are no exception. What McCain's man, Charles Black, was correctly saying is that if a new terrorist attack had rocked America on June 1 of this year the judges might well have held their hand. He's not the first to have given expression to that thought. David Addington, senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney was quoted last year by Jack Goldsmith, a former Justice Department lawyer, as having said yearningly that "we're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court", referring to a secret and in fact compliant court that oversees clandestine wiretapping.

Almost every presidential election sees allegations of an imminent 'October surprise'. There's scant doubt what sort of surprise McCain and the Republicans, aghast at Obama's surge in the polls, are yearning for.