Glad you agree with me, but I was corrected long ago. I believe its Mr. Love if I recall correctly.

But here we get the usual libertarian POV regarding unchecked prosectorial power. So which is it?

1. The ‘low quality’ system is for determining if someone is a combatant (or possibly a POW if, say, dealing with captured members of Saddam’s army or whatnot).

2. The ‘high quality’ system is for determining if someone is guilty of a crime and if so what his punishment should be.

It’s quite possible to discover someone who isn’t a combatant but is guilty of a crime. Say, for example, US troops stumble upon someone credit card scams from an Internet cafe in Pakistan. The person might not be a combatant against US forces but he can be charged with a criminal offsense. Likewise I suppose its possible for someone to be a combatant but not technically guilty of any crime (although I think the laws against ‘providing aid’ to terrorist organizations are so broad to make coming up with a hypothetical example pretty difficult).

Is there a huge check and balances system with the ‘low quality’ system? Hell yes. Since a ‘war on terrorism’ has almost no intellectual boundaries it does open the door to the gov’t holding people forever with no real oversight. The answer of the previous administration was that they were the ‘decider’ and simply could be trusted not to make any mistakes….despite numerous and egregous evidence to the contrary. So far the current administration has put some structure on the ‘low quality’ system as well as the SCOTUS setting up some limits but I agree it leaves a lot more work if this really is going to be a war that goes on for decades.

While the Democrats had contended that before the last election, the Obama administration has since endorsed indefinite detention without trial. In Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s case, they have promised to keep him locked up even if he is acquitted in this proposed criminal trial.

If captured terrorists can be held indefinitely, there is no need to try them at all. We can just hang onto them until they die of old age, and this is certainly desirable for those who retain intelligence value.

Which isn’t a good thing, either.