a ray of hope

as aravosis has noted, it is unbelievable that this country has fallen for the idea that our centuries-old justice system is not up to the task of dealing with islamic terrorists---"everything changed on 9/11," they say---ha, i say, yeah, everything changed when bush and his enablers (which would include everyone who voted for him in '04, it being official policy here to cut slack to those who made a mistake in '00, but not to those so benighted as to do it twice) started trashing our legal system, judges, laws, constitution and all----one of those enablers was colin powell, but at least he is now sorry that was so:

I would close Guantanamo — not tomorrow, this afternoon. I’d close it. And
I’d not let any of those people go. I would simply move them to the United
States and put them into our federal legal system. The concern was, well, then
they’ll have access to lawyers, then they’ll have access to writs of habeas
corpus. So what? Let them. Isn’t that what our system’s all about? And by the
way, America, unfortunately, has too many people in jail, all of whom had
lawyers and access to writs of habeas corpus. And so we can handle bad people in
our system. And so I would get rid of Guantanamo and I’d get rid of the military
commissions system, and use established procedures in federal law or in the
manual for courts martial. I would do that because it’s more equatable and it’s
more understandable in constitutional terms. But I’d also do it because every
morning I pick up a paper and some authoritarian figure, some person somewhere,
is using Guantanamo to hide their own misdeeds. So essentially we have shaken
the belief that the world had in America’s justice system by keeping a place
like Guantanamo open and creating things like the military commission.