What To Do With Enemy Combatants?

Iraq And Afghanistan: Who Is An Enemy Combatant? -- L.A. Times

Unconventional wars produce unconventional prisoners; it's crucial that the U.S. develop sensible guidelines on how to handle such prisoners.

Two things distinguish the irregular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: It is not clear who is a combatant, and the United States is fighting a conflict with no clear battlefront.

That leaves us with the vexing question of how to handle detentions in this particular form of warfare.

My Comment: An interesting debate on what to do with enemy combatants. In the Second World War the debate was very simple .... enemy combatants that were not in uniform could be executed on the spot .... and they were. But we do not live in that world anymore .... in our politically correct idea of what war should be like we are now following a torturous path of giving rights (and in some cases freedom) to some of the worse human beings on the planet.

We are already paying for this policy by having former Gunatanamo detainees become Al Qaeda/Taliban commanders when they are released from detention and put back into the field .... and I expect this trend to continue as we search for ways to come to some form of accommodation with Islamic extremism. But the results will be the same .... we are in a long long war against a religious/political ideology that extremists have adopted as their own .... and the sooner that we realize this the sooner that we will accept the idea that some of these extremists are going to be in prison (with no trial) for a very very very long time. Until then .... the debate continues.