The Week

-- Capt. James Yee, a Muslim chaplain in the Army who ministered to the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, was arrested -- one source said he was suspected of trying to help the prisoners in some, unwholesome way; another claimed that he was found with diagrams of the facility in his possession. More details, perhaps exculpatory, will emerge at his trial. But this is not the first problem to arise with Muslim chaplains in the military or in prisons; this summer, for example, the Washington Post reported that some military chaplains' websites direct troops to the lectures of jihadist clerics. Wanted: Muslim clergy untainted by Islamist (read: Saudi-backed) indoctrination. Any volunteers?

-- The Patriot Act, the anti-terrorist legislation passed by Congress right after September 11, has been subjected to intense, and usually ill-informed, criticism. Far from making concessions to the critics, President Bush has asked for three additional powers for law enforcement. He would expand the death penalty to apply to acts of sabotage that result in death. He thinks there should be a presumption against bail for suspects in terrorism cases. And he wants federal agents to be able to issue administrative subpoenas in terrorism cases, without getting a grand jury to go along. Florida Republican congressman Tom Feeney, who is sponsoring a bill to allow the administrative subpoenas, notes that more than 335 laws authorize them in other contexts, ranging from cases of health-care fraud to cases of threats against the president. He also notes that witnesses would be able to fight the subpoenas in court and, in almost all cases, to notify the target of the agents' action. Feeney and the administration present two rationales for the subpoenas. They would enable agents to act quickly in cases when there is not enough time to work with a grand jury. Second, they would make it possible for witnesses who want to cooperate to do so without fear of being sued for giving out information too freely. It is a reasonable case, but not quite dispositive. Why couldn't both problems be solved by letting judges, rather than grand juries, okay the subpoenas? If we are going to expand the administrative subpoena in terrorism cases, should we perhaps also restrict it in less serious cases? Are there actual cases in which the grand-jury requirement has impeded law enforcement? Until this case is made in more detail, even people sympathetic to the administration will continue to have doubts.

-- When immigrants become citizens, they are supposed to recite an Oath of Allegiance to the United States. It is not a pithy or poetic pledge, but it is a sturdy statement full of martial vigor. Some of the language dates back to the 1790s. In early September, the folks at the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services decided to make the oath's vocabulary more "modern," so they wrote a shorter version that removed words like "abjure" and "potentate." This new oath, however, included a grammatical error (subject-verb agreement), a clause that seemed to weaken the oath-takers' commitment to the Constitution, and a needlessly vague line about military-service obligations. National Review Online obtained a draft of the language and published it. This prompted the American Legion and former attorney general Ed Meese to write letters complaining about the changes. Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican, took to the floor of the Senate -- on September 11, no less -- to say that he preferred the traditional oath. Surprised by the strong response, the Bush administration delayed introducing the revision. Now the delay may become permanent: On September 17, Alexander offered legislation that would make the current Oath of Allegiance the law of the land.