U.S. Deports Most of Those Arrested in Sweeps After 9/11: As legal challenges to its policy of secret detentions advance slowly through the courts, the government has managed to deport most of the Sept. 11 detainees at the center of the lawsuits. [...] Other expulsions of the Sept. 11 detainees have been so abrupt that family members did not know for days after the fact. In the case of Ali Yaghi, a Jordanian detainee who had applied for residency, his American wife and three children in Albany were never told that he was deported to Jordan on June 24, after spending nearly nine months in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn on an immigration charge. Mr. Yaghi has not been heard from since, raising fears in his family that Jordan's security services may have been so suspicious about his long detention that they arrested him upon arrival.

Wonderful.

So now administration policy is to deport people before their cases can be heard, so that when they are challenged as to either the content of the charges or the secrecy of the trial, the case can be dismissed as moot.

Which means that if they keep this up (and they will) we will never get a case on the merits of the policy and the law, because the people with standing to challenge won't be around to sustain the challenge.

Our government can be utterly loathesome some days.