Judge Michael Mukasey, US president George W. Bush’s nominee to be America’s next attorney-general, is making some of the right noises about distancing himself from the Bush administration’s most nefarious anti-terrorism policies.

In his Senate confirmation hearings earlier this week, he acknowledged that Mr Bush had the legal right to detain terrorism suspects indefinitely – because the US Supreme Court, in the 2004 Hamdi decision, indisputably gave him that right. But Mr Mukasey also has the good political sense to point out that indefinite detention without trial, at places like the notorious Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, may be bad policy even if it is good law.