A Federal Appeals Court’s unanimous rejection on June 11 of President Bush’s effort to deny judicial review and due process to a legal alien who has been militarily incarcerated for four years—because Bush says he is a Qaeda agent—was a ringing and welcome defense of our constitutional freedoms.

But I worry that two of the three judges may have gone too far, or exposed a gap in our laws that Congress needs to fill, in their additional, broader holding. It was that Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri and other suspected Qaeda terrorists arrested in the United States cannot be detained at all, no matter how dangerous, unless the government brings criminal charges against them within a week of arrest or is unable to deport them.

Whether or not correct as a matter of law, this majority opinion points, in my view, to the need for explicit congressional authorization of prolonged (although not indefinite) detention and aggressive (although not abusive) interrogation of suspected Qaeda agents who cannot be criminally prosecuted. Congress should also require muscular due process safeguards and exacting judicial review, which the Bush administration has furiously opposed, to prevent erroneous detentions of innocent people.

More broadly, the chasm between the views of the president and these two judges on how such cases should be handled illustrates yet again the need for Congress to end its shameful abdication of its duty to rethink the war-on-terrorism’s detention and interrogation policy from the ground up.

The easy issue in the al-Marri case is whether foreigners living legally in this country who are suspected of being Qaeda sleeper agents—such as al-Marri, a Qatari graduate student at Bradley University who lived in Peoria, Ill., with his wife and five children—can be subjected to long-term military detention based solely on the president’s say-so, with no right to due process or judicial review.