The Supreme Court delivered quite a rebuff to left-wing critics of the Bush administration’s war effort when it let stand an appeals court ruling that permitted the government to keep secret the names of individuals it is detaining in connection with September 11. And also to keep secret the names of their lawyers. Plaintiffs in the case included the Center for National Security Studies and a host of other organizations, including, among others, The Nation magazine, the Council on American Islamic Relations, Human Rights Watch, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and People for the American Way. In other words, not a crowd that has ever been agitating for an aggressive American military response to the attacks of September 11.

In this case, they were seeking to force the Justice Department — that is, America — to release what their petition called names and other basic information relating to hundreds of people who were detained in the weeks immediately following September 11, including many whom were not even suspected of any linkage to terrorist activity. They also argued, in essence, that the First Amendment actually prohibited the government from refusing to disclose the identities of those it arrested and detained, absent a specific showing of a compelling need for secret arrests.

There are going to be a lot of cases bidding for the Supreme Court’s attention in the course of the war by Islamic extremists against our country. It may well be that the court will find along the way that the Bush administration has been too zealous in pursuit of the enemy within the United States or in dealing with suspected enemy agents once in American custody. But it is illuminating to see how brusquely the Supreme Court dispensed with the claims of the Center for National Security Studies, which tried to use both the Freedom of Information Act, of all things, and the First Amendment, of all things, to block the government’s efforts to keep the enemy from detecting the patterns of its investigation.

The decision being appealed had been written by a famously conservative judge who rides the Second Appeals Circuit, David Sentelle. He reckoned that the Freedom of Information Act has exemptions that permit the government to maintain the secrecy it has been maintaining in these wartime cases. He also reckoned that while the “plain language” of the First Amendment broadly protects the freedom of individuals and the press to speak or publish, it does not mandate a right of access to government information. In the event, the Center for National Security Studies was unable to get even four justices to agree that the Supreme Court should take the case. In other words, they didn’t get to first base.

This is likely to be met with a good bit of hand-wringing in anti-war quarters. But we take it as an encouraging sign that the Supreme Court is not going to permit America, or its representatives, to be easily pushed around by the courts during the course of this war. We live in an extraordinary time, when America is once again, as it was in the Cold War, under attack in a vast, twilight struggle. There is absolutely no reason that this should be permitted to result in an unraveling of the civil liberties and the checks and balances that are such bedrock to our Constitution. But neither is there a constitutional reason to stretch the First Amendment and the subsidiary laws in ways that were not intended.