re: "Guantanamo"

David Warren of DavidWarrenOnline ("ESSAYS ON OUR TIMES ") explains why we intern terrorists.

Money quote(s):

"(I)n principle, some inmates may have been captured by mistake, and in practice military tribunals were proceeding, in which guilt had yet to be formally established. Such trials have been suspended for 120 days"

"Guantanamo was selected, by the Bush administration, to intern terrorists, because no better solution could be found. The military commissions were created, ditto. Under actual international and American law, the inmates have no certain rights whatever: they were not proper soldiers, and therefore not legitimate prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. They may thank their stars they were not shot upon capture."

There's still time. After all, they're still war criminals.

"As people understood, in the shadow of the World Trade Center, and as they still understand in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are dealing with monstrous enemies -- with people who not only kill our allied soldiers, but kill defenceless non-combatants gratuitously; who employ terror, to impose tyranny. The insistence on fine points of juridical etiquette in the heat of battle would be insane. But insisting on it later in the calm of a prison camp betrays only a failure of perspective.

It is right of the law to prohibit torture. It is right in almost every circumstance to obey the law (and accept the consequences in any other). There will, however, always be tight corners where "the law is a ass," and to pretend this were never the case is to assume a disingenuous posture. Moreover, as when Guantanamo opened, there are circumstances in which no existing law has been written or can be applied, and yet the principle of retribution remains: that the innocent will be vindicated, that the guilty will be punished."

&

"To set any of the Guantanamo inmates free, on some jurisprudential technicality, is to smear one's hands with the blood of their victims when they return to their trade. This is not a hypothetical proposition: for while the numbers are disputed, a proportion of "low risk" inmates already freed from Guantanamo have returned to action."

That proportion is already known to be at least ten percent. Which would be a pretty darn low "recidivism" rate for ordinary criminals but is unacceptable for terrorists bent on mass murder.