I know you know about this but I'll mention it anyway

"What's this say? '...truths to be self-evident ... created equal ... life, liberty' blah blah blah. Lotsa complaints about arbitrary authority exercised by the King.... Who writes this crap, anyway?"

Washington, Feb. 12 - Senior Defense Department officials said Thursday that they were planning to keep a large portion of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, there for many years, perhaps indefinitely.

The officials said they would soon set up a panel to review those long-term prisoners' cases annually to determine whether the men remained a threat to the United States or could be released.

This, believe it or not, is supposed to be "part of a Pentagon effort to counter sharp criticism by members of human rights groups and foreign governments" about violation of human rights at Guantanamo, where about 650 people are held under maximum security without being charged with any crime. If proposing indefinite imprisonment without charges or any access to legal representation or review by anyone beyond their captors is "countering" such criticism, I'd hate like hell to see what they'd do in defiance of it.

The [senior Defense Department] official said that while some critics worried about the rights of the detainees, the Pentagon was more concerned with "the rights of the soldiers having these people not going back to the battlefield" and the rights of the soldiers' families not to have their relatives face the same men in combat.

This supposedly clever formulation is a slimy attempt to say "you're either for our soldiers or you're for the terrorists" without having the guts to actually say it. But it unintentionally points up the central issue: How the hell do you know they're guilty of anything? Since the US insists they're not soldiers and thus ineligible for POW status, they should only be held if they've committed an offense. If they're guilty of a crime, prove it. Charge them, convict them, and sentence them.

But wait, that won't actually solve anything, will it? Some of them, it seems, may be charged before a military tribunal,

"[b]ut whether a person is to be charged before a military commission is not the reason we're holding them," said the senior defense official. The official said it was possible that an individual could be convicted by a tribunal and serve a five-year sentence and then not be released if he were judged to remain a danger,

which pretty much makes such tribunals classic show trials. (I wonder if anyone asked the "official" what would happen if the person were acquitted.)

In a speech on Friday, Donald Rumsfeld told those experts on international law, the Miami Chamber of Commerce, that the policy of indefinite detention

was consistent with the international laws of war. ...

"We need to keep in mind that the people in US custody are not there because they stole a car or robbed a bank.

"They are enemy combatants and terrorists who are being detained for acts of war against our country and that is why different rules have to apply."

But as I understand it, an "act of war" is a definable crime. So, again, why haven't they been charged? Oh, wait, I missed it - "combatants and terrorists ... detained for acts of war." Yeah, that presumption of innocence stuff is so pre-9/11.