The Obama administration has decided to put terrorists, captured on battlefields, fighting against and killing U.S. forces, on trial in American courtrooms with American rights and American lawyers. There is no point of American or international law which demands such treatment. Even the Attorney General, Eric Holder, has admitted that this was not a requirement of the law as he saw it but was rather a choice. The rationale for this decision is deeply flawed and as the consequences of this decision emerge and as the trials grow closer the American people will rightfully grow even more outraged.

It is frequently said that in our justice system the possibility of murders going free is the price we pay for the protection we grant all who are accused of crimes under the law. Indeed we do permit criminals to "walk" when procedural flaws undermine the evidence presented against them in court. When a murderer manages to escape punishment in our country we are rightly agrieved by the justice to the victim (and his or her loved ones) evaded. We do not expect that unconvicted murderer to immediately take up weapons again and begin to kill indiscriminantly. But when we put terrorists on trial, and when we deliberately increase our hurdles against their conviction, it is not only their past atrocities that we are addressing but their future ones as well.

The manner of our apprehending terrorists in Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere and the crimes that they are accused of comitting are characteristic of a war and should be treated as such. We have already seen too many killers set free from Guatanamo Bay only to return to their twisted conception of holy war. A deep and perverted obsession with due process is a characteristic of our overly legalized society. Due process applies within a society governed by rules with which its members agree, at least implicitly, by their participation in that society. Due process has no meaning for attackers of that society from outside, to say nothing of terrorists who target civilization as a whole. Protection of society is a prerogative which it is fatal to abjure. People understand that when we fail to act in our own defense we are failing first and foremost to believe in our society. Americans (and the rest of the world) see the Obama Administration agonizing over the process and the legality whereby we protect ourselves and they see it, correctly, as the product of a guilty conscience. Americans do not, predominantly, feel guilty for their country. Rather, they are generally proud of it.