The thesis of this update on developments in US anti-terrorism law since 9/11 is that the system of checks and balances among the several branches of the government, executive, judicial and legislative, has been undermined by the deferral and avoidance of key decisions by each of the branches and the withdrawal of authority by one branch from another. Examples are drawn from four Supreme Court decisions handed down since 9/11; the use of sunset clauses in the USA PATRIOT Act; the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005; the use of torture in interrogating suspected terrorists; National Security Agency electronic surveillance; extraordinary renditions of suspected terrorists; and the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

One of the key reasons why the Bush Administration opted to create the military commissions for trying terrorism cases was the desire to use classified information without having to face the risk that in some instances the government might be faced with a dilemma — whether to reveal the classified information or drop the prosecution and free the defendant. The editorial comments published in this issue of the Journal challenge the provisions of the Military Commissions Act (MCA) 2006 under the law of war, international law, the Geneva Conventions as well as under US constitutional law. In the end, however, the legal status of the MCA will be finally determined by the US Supreme Court. It seems likely that a new majority of the Court would be formed that would uphold the constitutionality of many of the provisions of the MCA. The US approach to dealing with terrorism has consisted of a series of acts, both on the world stage and in the United States, in a continuing drama. If the events of the post-9/11 period are thought of in terms of high theatre, then the link between Hamdan and the MCA moves us into a state of dramatic tension — the Court first resolves a series of key issues, then Congress moves centre stage and on most of the issues takes contrary positions, but in a context where the Court itself has invited legislative action. The denouement will be reached when these issues return to the Supreme Court and it then decides whether the statutory provisions in question are constitutionally vulnerable.

The technique of chemical-shift normal-incidence X-ray standing waves (CS-NIXSW) has been applied to a study of the interaction of SO2 with Cu(111), yielding quantitative information on the local adsorption geometry of adsorbed SO2 at low temperature and coadsorbed atomic sulfur with an SOx species, identified on the basis of near-edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) as SO3. Atomic sulfur appears to occupy a mixture of face-centred cubic and hexagonal close-packed hollow sites, while the SO3 species adsorbs with its C3v axis perpendicular to the surface atop a surface copper atom with the SO bonds out of plane such that the oxygen atoms are closer to the surface; there appears to be some local distortion of the outermost copper layers around this species. While SO2 is found to adsorb with its molecular plane essentially perpendicular to the surface, and the data are most readily interpreted in terms of a bridging geometry bonding through the oxygen atoms, there are marked inconsistencies between these results and those of an earlier surface extended XAFS (SEXAFS) investigation of this species on Cu(111), and alternative interpretations are discussed.