How to Avoid Imprisoning People? Kill Them.

The problem with the US prison at Guantanamo Bay is that it has been allowed to lie outside the ordinary system of justice. Prisoners captured by the CIA, by military intelligence, and even by militias just barely allied with the United States have been hauled to Cuba because there is no legally usable evidence against them, and the American government has denied that the Geneva Conventions apply to them.

from the Guardian.com

Jess Bravin (from that hotbed of radicalism, The Wall Street Journal) described in his book The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay the failure of the system of military commissions designed by a group of cynical men in the second Bush Administration. The courts collapsed under the weight of the negligence of the people who made it. Dick Cheney, John Yoo and others so totally disdained the concept of the rule of law that they deliberately placed incompetent judges on the courts, says Brevin, so defendants could not get a fair trial. Even when people within the administration protested, these bizarrely un-American men railroaded though a series of deliberately dysfunctional procedures.

Turns out that this kind of thing does not work. Our legal system does work, though imperfectly. We can convict bad guys while also defending their rights. Security and ordered liberty are not incompatible.

Now, I understand the problem with closing Gitmo. The people in there really do want to kill us now, whether they did before or not. Arbitrary, nasty imprisonment over 12 years radicalized them, and now we can not in good conscience free them to wreak havoc on the population.

But why is it better to just off the bad guys instead? I'm not sure I fully believe the claim that Obama is using drone strikes solely because he can't close Guantanamo. Still, the correlation is ugly.