Prisoners and Prisoners of War

On Cold Mountain we support the war seeing it as we do as a battle for the survival of western civilisation, the current bulwark of which is the United States. We're also constitutionalists though and this storycertainly made us stop mid-ale and ponder. Should enemy alien prisoners, as distinct from prisoners of war, be denied habeas corpus. This is an important question because, if the answer is yea, then is there any class of non-citizens who cannot be declared enemies and treated similarly? If the answer is nay, the how does the United States, or any country, protect it's citizens from a determined, yet non-military, lethal threat?

The United States has long and rightly refused to subject its citizens to the jurisdiction of an International Criminal Court, fearing political prosecutions. Is what's happening at Guantanamo really any different from Belgian judges going around issuing arrest orders for whatever foreigner offends those refined Euro-sensibilities? Well, no. Not logically anyway.

We have thought from the outset that Bush should have asked Congress for a proper declaration of war, and not just some fuzzy authorisation. That would have nicely clarified the status of all concerned: prisoners of war, enemy aliens, combatants and Americans who choose to take up arms against their country.

As it is, we now think that a distinction should be made between those captured as combatants, on or off the battlefield, and those arrested as part of the terror infrastructure. The former are POW's, and international law and practice are well established on the rights of the prisoners and on the rights and obligations of the detaining power.

Captured terrorists off the battlefield should be held where they're captured until such information as they have is surrendered at which point they can either be tried by the courts where they're captured (fancy your chances before an Iraqi court these days?) or in the United States, where, like it or not, they are entitled to the protection of the Constitution.