Say this about the Bush administration's Constitution-straining attitude toward due process: It's certainly one way to bring Jews and Muslims together. In an unusual "friend of the court" brief filed last week, leading Jewish organizations joined Arab and Muslim groups in supporting the rights of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay to seek review in federal court of the legality of their detentions.

The administration has strongly opposed permitting habeas corpus suits by foreigners held as enemy combatants outside the United States. At the administration's urging, Congress in 2006 passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006. A key component of the act strips federal courts of the ability to hear habeas cases filed by Guantanamo detainees.

The coalition of human rights, public interest, and religious groups in Boumediene v. Bush and al Odah v. United States challenges MCA. Their brief asserts that "the Framers of our Constitution expressly ensured that habeas corpus would be available to permit the Judiciary to check absolute Executive power." It refers to the administration's policies as "Kafkaesque" and suggests that denying due process is the kind of thing seen in "other countries where executive power is absolute."

The friends of the court, if not of each other, include the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. as well as the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League, Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and Union for Reform Judaism.

"Winning the war on terror is critically important, but we must find a way to provide security without undermining America's enduring respect for the rule of law and our system of checks and balances," ADL national chair Glen S. Lewy and national director Abraham H. Foxman wrote in a statement announcing the brief. "Allowing detainees to be held — perhaps indefinitely — without a meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention is contrary to American principles of fairness and due process and our commitment to civil liberties."

Applying our own standards of justice to the war on terror is not just good "public diplomacy" — although it is that too. It is a reminder of who we are as a country and the alternative we represent to the terrorists themselves.