The refusal today of the Supreme Court to entertain the appeals of seven prisoners at Guantanamo is going to be greeted with a great deal of weeping and wailing from the anti-war camp and its civil liberties chorus. They are going to say it is “goodbye Boumediene,” a reference to the last time the Supreme Court sided against the government in one of these war prisoners cases. In that case the court granted a writ of habeas corpus to Lakhdar Boumediene and five other prisoners that led eventually to all but one of them being freed. The civil liberties camp claimed the case as a great triumph.

Ever since then, however, the judges who ride circuit for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia — the key appellate court in these cases — have shown little sympathy for the efforts of the remaining Guantanamo prisoners to take advantage of The Great Writ, as habeas corpus is known. That in itself is not surprising. The district judge who eventually freed five of the Boumediene prisoners, Richard Leon, warned at the time that few other cases would be like it and that there should be no false hopes. In cases since then the Nine have been content to let matters rest with the District of Columbia circuit.

What is surprising is the forcefulness with which the riders of the District of Columbia appeals circuit are signaling their view that the better part of wisdom in Boumediene rested with the dissenters on the Supreme Court. Those would be the Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts, and Justices Scalia, Alito, and Thomas. The Great Scalia had written a barn-burner of a dissent in, in which he argued that the the Great Writ “does not, and never has, run in favor of aliens abroad.” After all, the only instances where the Constitution permits a suspension of habeas corpus is instances of rebellion or invasion at home.

The hero of the latest case is Judge Janice Rogers Brown, one of the riders of the District of Columbia circuit. She wrote one of the opinions that the Supreme Court has just allowed to stand. It involved a prisoner named Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a Yemeni who had been picked up in near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and has been held at Guantanomo for the past decade. Latif offered an innocent explanation of what he was doing in the war zone, and a district court judge had ordered his release. Judge Brown overturned the order. Boumediene “fundamentally altered the calculus of war,” she conceded. But she warned the district court that “a detainee’s self-serving account must be credible — not just plausible — to overcome presumptively reliable government evidence.”

What we find remarkable in this case is the clarity of thinking of this appellate judge, a sharecropper’s daughter who was once a leftist and who, in her adulthood, moved to the right. Our guess — much of the evidence in this case is secret — is that the judge has reached no conclusion in her own mind in respect of whether Latif is guilty or innocent. But she understands that in a time of war, the calculus is different and the burden is shifted. This has now now been recognized by the administrations of both Presidents Bush and Obama. It’s the detainee on whom the burden rests. Surely it is a hard truth. But how, amid the desperation of war, could it be otherwise?