This is battlefield Earth

Barack Obama's justice department announced last week that approximately 50 detainees at Guantanamo Bay are to be imprisoned indefinitely, without being targeted for either civilian trial or military commission. The reasoning, according to the government is that these 50 prisoners (approximately 25% of all those currently held at Gitmo) are "to difficult to prosecute and too dangerous for release". 40 other prisoners are set for trial, and 110 are targeted for release (if their own countries will take them back).

There is absolutely nothing controversial about a country at war detaining prisoners captured on the battlefield, and holding them until the conflict has ended. That's because prisoners of war aren't criminals - once the war has ended, they get to go home. Perpetrators of war crimes, by contrast, don't get to go home when the conflict is over - they get prosecuted under due process, and then punished for those crimes, up to and including by execution. This group of 50 individuals has been given a third designation by the government, the people who we know are guilty, but we can't prove it, so just trust us. This category was created not with any special law passed by Congress, but exists (according to the Obama administration) by virtue of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Let's review. The "battlefield", just so we all understand, is the planet. The ACLU has just released a handy little chart that shows where the Gitmo detainees were picked up - this is a worldwide arrest pattern, and it includes the United States. Also, this particular "war" is not likely to coherently end in our lifetimes - even if Iraq and Afghanistan tamper down in the next 10 years, it's difficult to imagine a final victory over Islamic terrorism ever really conclusively happening - sort of like drugs or poverty. So, Barack Obama has asserted the government's right to arrest anyone, anywhere in the world, and imprison them forever without independent due process, simply by asserting that they're too dangerous to release but too difficult to prosecute. I have to ask - where the hell are the people who don't trust the government to run a health insurance plan in all this?

If these people were dangerous, there'd be some kind of evidence against them. If that evidence were related to sensitive national security information, there are rules for handling classified material that have worked fine for decades. If that evidence was obtained by torturing the suspects, then it's inherently unreliable. The fact we're even talking about this, under a Democratic president, with no substantive opposition, is simply amazing, and unprecedented.

I'm trying to find a list of the 50 to confirm this, but if I'm not mistaken, one of the individuals who won't be going home any time soon is British/Saudi national Shaker Aamer, who, it just so happens, claims to have been tortured by asphyxiation at Gitmo the same night in 2006 that three inmates died under suspicious circumstances. I'm just saying.