The Amontillado Option

It was an affront to common sense, a willful and undermining misreading of the Geneva Conventions, and a blatantly unconstitutional stab at grabbing power from both the Legislative and Executive branches, but the Supreme Court's much disputed and reviled Hamdan decision—which some have stated is on par with Dredd Scott and Pessy vs. Ferguson as "a great 'self-inflicted wound'"—might actually have a silver lining after all, as pointed out briefly by Captain Ed:

The ruling from the Supreme Court that essentially grants terrorists Geneva Convention protections needs to get reversed as quickly as possible. The court's majority decision declared that the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) issued by Congress in 2001 somehow did not cover the establishment of military tribunals for unlawful combatants, which leaves Congress the opening to fill the gap.

I actually prefer the method that Justice Stevens explicitly left open to the Bush administration in his opinion: leave them detained until hostilities cease in the war on terror. Radical Islam does not leave many deterrents to its lunatic pawns. Death in combat or a summary execution suits them fine. Public trials give them the opportunity to exploit our civil justice system as platforms for their screeds, as Zacarias Moussaoui showed. However, the perpetual and anonymous detention offered by Stevens does give the terrorists the one situation they find most repellent -- and that could persuade at least a few of them that taking on the US holds nothing but a miserable stretch of decades in an iron cage, with no public outlet for their hatred.

I've mentioned in the past that if we are going to extend Geneva Protections to terrorists (who are disbarred from Geneva Protections due to Article 4.1.2, no matter what Justice Stevens says), then we should specifically use the portion of the Geneva Conventions that favors us the most.

The world has been at war with Islamic fundementalists at shifting borders for almost 1,400 years. More than millennia of precedent indicates that Islam—which divides the world into the House of War and House of Submission—will be at war with the rest of the world as long as it exists.

While President Bush was taking steps with the tribunals struck down by Hamdan to provide some sort of attempt at providing trials, perhaps he shouldn't have bothered.

Ironically, the Supreme Court now gives us a containment option straight out of a horror story.

Edgar Alan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado is perhaps one of the most classic horror stories; a man repeatedly wronged by another lures his victim into a dank catacombs where he first chains him, and then proceeds to wall him up alive.

Justice John Paul Stevens and the four other prevailing members of the Court have now set the stage for the terrorists we've captured to remain under U.S. custody without any sort of trial whatsoever for decades to come. They may conceivably be confined as prisoners of war—in good health, not bound in catacombs, mind you—until either they expire or jihad against the West ceases.

The Court has created the chance for the perpetual internment of captured terrorists without the mess of a jury trial. Somehow, I doubt liberals will be as happy with the Hamdan decision as they once were if this or following Administrations uses this option.

Frankly, I prefer tribunals, but I could force myself to live with this.

In pace requiescat!