If we imprison people, forever, without a trial, we are no better than Saddam or Kim Jong Il or any other evil bastard.  We lose any moral high ground we have ever had, and we prove our critics to be correct.  There is no middle ground here.  I am absolutely disgusted that this is even being contemplated.  We are the United Fucking States of America, and we do not imprison people forever without a trial.

Look, I understand that we’re fighting a new kind of war, and there are new rules.  I’m not a purist.  I know that there is a big difference between what we know about a prisoner and what we could be able to prove at trial.  But, ultimately, I would rather these men be set free, knowing they would subsequently make war against us again, than establish the precedent that we will ignore our own most fundamental principles when it is convenient for us to do so.  We have men and women who are in Iraq right now giving their lives to establish a society in Iraq that eschews the practices of the Saddam era, practices which involved these types of imprisonments, and it is a fucking obscenity that we are willing to resort to the same degree of behavior that they are dying to defeat.

If this idea is not publicly denounced immediately by President Bush then he might as well be everything that Michael Moore has ever said he is.

Update: Allow me to give you an illustration of my point, using the case of Coral Watts, a convicted serial killer in Texas.  Through a series of legislative steps Watts was shecduled for mandatory parole in 2006, despite being a convected and admitted serial killer, and considered beyond any chance of rehabilitation.  In a nutshell, had Watts been released he would have killed again, unquestionably.  So, considering the threat to public safety, what did Texas do?  Did they simply decide to crap all over their own laws and keep him imprisoned indefinitely?  Absolutely not.  They contacted Michigan, a state of his prior residence, and managed to convict him of a crime he committed while he lived there.

My point is that in America, as in all free democracies, the process has to be more important than the outcome.  Like I said previously, I am not a purist, and I undertstand that we have to have a new set of rules when facing a new kind of enemy, which is why I have been mostly supportive of the administrations imprisonment policies up to this point.  A reasonable case can be made that these men are not prisoners of war as defined by the Geneva Conventions, and as such the US is not beholden to its constraints when dealing with them.  But the idea that we will imprison men without a trial, even one done in a secret national security court, is absolutely abhorrent to me.  This is simply beyond the pale, the point at which we become the very thing we are trying to defeat.  Taking necessary steps to defeat evil is one thing, but becoming a mirror image of that evil in the process is another.  No matter what the benefit, this is simply not the right thing to do.