State Department lawyer, John Bellinger, engages the blogosphere with a defense of the Bush administration’s detention policies in the war on terror. Money quote:
[W]e found ourselves in an armed conflict in Afghanistan starting in October 2001. In the course of that conflict, we detained members of al Qaida and the Taliban, some of whom are now in Guantanamo. U.S. or allied forces captured the majority of these detainees in late 2001 or early 2002 in or near Afghanistan. One of the most basic precepts in the law of armed conflict is that states may detain enemy combatants until the cessation of hostilities. It cannot reasonably be argued that the United States and its allies had the right to use force in Afghanistan but did not have the right to detain individuals as an incident to the armed conflict that ensued, unless we planned to charge them with a crime. The Supreme Court explicitly has affirmed in Hamdi that the United States had the right to detain enemy combatants in the armed conflict that ensued after our decision to act in self-defense.
Of course, if al Qaeda detainees had actually been treated as "prisoners of war," and not tortured, then this debate would not be occurring at all; or it would be occurring with a minimal level of trust in the decency and good faith of this administration. But we have learned not to give Bush or Cheney even a minimal level of trust. And their brutal, dumb and self-defeating detainee policies are central to that lack of trust.
The Dish 