If my passport didn't say I was a U.S. citizen, I'm not sure I'd know otherwise

cuz the country i thought was my own would never have supposedly intelligent, former senior government officials spewing this kind of bullshit...

former bush administration attorney general jack goldsmith in today's nyt...

THE Obama administration wants to show that federal courts can handle trials of Guantánamo Bay detainees, and had therefore placed high hopes in the prosecution of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, accused in the 1998 bombings of American embassies in East Africa. On Wednesday a federal judge, Lewis Kaplan of the United States District Court in Manhattan, made the government’s case much harder when he excluded the testimony of the government’s central witness because the government learned about the witness through interrogating Mr. Ghailani at a secret overseas prison run by the C.I.A.

Some, mostly liberals and civil libertarians, applauded the ruling, saying it showed that the rule of law is being restored. But many conservatives denounced it as proof that high-level terrorists cannot reliably be prosecuted in civilian courts and should instead be tried by military commissions.

The real lesson of the ruling, however, is that prosecution in either criminal court or a tribunal is the wrong approach. The administration should instead embrace what has been the main mechanism for terrorist incapacitation since 9/11: military detention without charge or trial.

[...]

[W]hile it is more difficult than ever to keep someone like Mr. Ghailani in military detention, it is far easier to detain him than to convict him in a civilian trial or a military commission. Military detention proceedings have relatively forgiving evidence rules and aren’t constrained by constitutional trial rules like the right to a jury and to confront witnesses. There is little doubt that Mr. Ghailani could be held in military detention until the conflict with Al Qaeda ends.

gosh, it all sounds so REASONABLE doesn't it...? until, of course, you read that last sentence and it suddenly dawns on you that plans don't call for the conflict with terrorism to EVER END... everything we read, everything we're told, says that we're in a forever war*, a war that cannot be won and will not end...

oh, yeah... don't forget that other little niggling bit goldsmith didn't bother to address... is mr. ghailani actually a terrorist...? after all, if the aumf put us at "war" with terrorism and if mr. ghailani is - presumably - a terrorist, how was that determined...?

if we're in an endless war and terrorism is the declared "enemy," then pow's have nothing to look forward to except a lifetime of detention... their lives are essentially over...

is the u.s. a great country or what...?

* [I]n November 2002, retired U.S. Army Gen. William Odom appeared on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" program and told viewers: "Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It's a tactic. It's about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we're going to win that war. We're not going to win the war on terrorism."

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