Alberto Gonzales is assured of his place in history. When he at last steps down as US attorney-general next month, it will be as the most reviled and ridiculed holder of that office in recent memory. With Democrats cheering his departure and Republicans sighing with relief, it may seem outlandish to say that the full measure of his failure is insufficiently acknowledged, but this is true.

Mr Gonzales was President George W. Bush’s principal legal facilitator in a string of ill-conceived efforts to abridge civil liberties and undermine the country’s constitutional checks and balances. Those efforts have drawn furious criticism. But less attention is paid to what the administration has in fact achieved: not so much a tyranny in the making as a paralysing legal vacuum. Six years after the attacks of 2001, the US has no real consensus and no well-formed legal policy on fighting the “war on terror”.