There was no reason to worry about that stemwinder Eric Holder delivered at the American Constitution Society last June. Sure, he had claimed that Bush national-security measures — the ones that staved off another 9/11 for seven years — were “needlessly abusive and unlawful practices” that “made us less, rather than more, safe.” And, okay, he did rail about “torture,” “secret electronic surveillance,” and measures that “denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants.” And, yes, the crowd did squeal with delight when he inveighed, “We owe the American people a reckoning.” But that was just a bunch of red meat for lefty lawyers, right? No need to take it seriously.

And surely there was no need to fret over those terrorist pardons on Holder’s watch: not the FALN thugs, whose organization carried out more than 130 bombings in the United States; and not the two Weather Underground bombers, who were allowed to skip out of their combined century of jail time for waging war against “Amerika.” That was all Clinton, Holder fans insisted. Holder’s not a pol, he’s a law-enforcement pro. He gets the terrorist threat — why, just look at his résumé.

The new attorney general would understand that “we are at war,” as he put it during his confirmation testimony. “To be honest,” Holder explained, he believed that “our nation didn’t realize that we were at war when, in fact, we were.” On reflection, when he “look[ed] back” at his tenure helping run the Clinton Justice Department — when he considered “the embassy bombings, the bombing of the Cole” — Holder had to admit that “we as a nation should have realized that, at that point, we were at war. We should not have waited until September the 11th of 2001 to make that determination.” Things are different now, though. Holder had come to appreciate that there are dangerous terrorists out there who mean real harm to Americans. He grasped, he said, that those terrorists have to be stopped and captured — even if it means detaining them without trial.

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It was an effective performance — emphasis on performance.

Holder got the job, and that turned out to be a good day for Binyam Mohammed. He was the would-be accomplice of would-be “dirty bomber” (and now convicted terrorist) José Padilla. Mohammed planned to carry out mass-murder attacks in American cities. A succession of three Bush-era attorneys general kept him locked up in accordance with the laws of war, a practice the Supreme Court reaffirmed in its 2004 Hamdi decision. Moreover, military prosecutors believed they had a strong war-crimes case. But Mohammed will not be tried by the military, or by Holder’s department. Of course, declining to try him would not be a big deal as long as Mohammed remained incarcerated. After all, as Holder solemnly declared to the Senate.

If we have a basis to determine that a person is dangerous, and we have evidence that would demonstrate that that person is dangerous, I don't think that, given the Supreme Court decision in Hamdi, and the responsibility that I have as attorney [general] of the United States, should I be confirmed, for the safety of this nation, that that is a person who we can release.

Right. We have plenty of basis and evidence that Mohammed is dangerous. But Holder’s sense of “responsibility . . . as attorney general . . . for the safety of this nation” did not stop him from agreeing to Mohammed’s release and transfer to England — where he now plots freely while on the British dole.

Naturally, having discerned that all the tough talk was just that, talk, British authorities are back on the administration’s doorstep, demanding the release of Shaker Aamer. He’s a bin Laden confidant who trained aspiring terrorists at al-Qaeda camps, met with shoe-bomber Richard Reid, and traveled widely in the United States — meeting with embedded terrorists and sharing an apartment with Zacarias Moussaoui (convicted in 2006 for his complicity in the 9/11 plot). Anyone want to bet how that gets resolved?

Meantime, at a press briefing two weeks ago, Holder said he’d been pondering the shuttering of Guantanamo Bay — which is to say, the emerging plan to honor the closure commitment Obama made to the Left simply by springing most of the remaining 240 or so detainees, several of whom are suing the United States courtesy of the free legal help they’ve gotten over the last several years from Holder’s former law firm. Some of these captives, Holder observed, would need to be released in the United States, the better to encourage other nations to join Adopt-a-Binyam.

The detainees, it bears remembering, are aliens affiliated with the global jihad. In the main, they are associated with terrorist organizations and have received paramilitary training. Under federal law, both terror-group membership and terrorist training are grounds for excluding aliens from the United States. That law was enacted in 2005 because of the war Holder says he now realizes we’ve been in for over a decade. It was enacted because paramilitary courses factored into all those terrorist attacks from the 1990s that “we as a nation” missed the significance of. Holder hasn’t explained how turning trained jihadists loose on the infidels that they were training to kill is consistent with his new war mentality (a war in which, at his direction, we no longer call enemy combatants “enemy combatants”). Nor is it clear how this comports with his “responsibility . . . for the safety of this nation” and his obligation to enforce U.S. statutes.