I mean, you're absolutely right when you say below this will only embolden Americas foes by making us look weak. But your proposal is too small to have an effect. We need something more definitive, something to generate... I dunno, call it, maybe, "shock and awe" and then, once the rest of the world fears us enough, is, if you will, TERRIFIED enough, they'll do as we say. You're on the right track; we're not dealing with human beings and shouldn't treat them as such. But you need to think bigger, maybe blow up some large offices with thousands of civilians inside at the time. After all, killing thousands is only wrong if you kill the wrong ones. As long as you can establish, at least in your own mind, that the people you're killing aren't really PEOPLE at all, anything you do to them is legitimate.

Still, it's good that you're thinking constructively; keep at it, and Death to Not-America!

If their tactics are valid, if their motives are pure, why are we fighting them? And if we are, in fact, fighting them, why do so many suggest we adopt the very practices we claim to abhor? Not that I really believe a military tribunal would be over in a couple hours; the Allies started preparing for Nuremberg in 1942 and concluded the final trail in 1949. The chief American prosecutor and two Supreme Court Justices (both of whom sided with FDR in Quirin) still had harsh words for them. The consensus, even among Justices who found for the US in Quirin, seems to have been that the Allies were making up laws as they went to satisfy the thirst for vengeance rather than justice, hence we ignored the cases where France, Britain and/or Russia did things that earned Nazis dishonorable death. The only mention of them at Nuremberg was specifically exempting Soviet leaders from charges and falsely declaring the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact a forgery. So, yeah, we can go that route, but let's not call it justice; leave the self-righteous hypocrisy to bin Laden.

If, like so many, you wish to stand on the horrible Quirin precedent, bear in mind the SCOTUS ruled last June that "the Military Commissions Act could not remove the right for Guantanamo captives to access the US Federal Court system" (i.e. you don't get to make someone a non-person just by slapping a never defined "enemy combatant" label on them. )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_combatant

You suggest we ignore both the SCOTUS and the AGs clearly stated position. Not so long ago the VP himself called that treason. The good old days, I suppose.

When you've become the enemy, they've won. It disturbs and saddens me that the more enthusiastic a person is about fighting terrorism the more likely they are to endorse it. We are not them. We are better. I will not let them turn my democracy into a police state, fill it with kangaroo courts standing by to summarily execute all sub-humans deviating from what they subjectively claim to be the indisputable truth, where the most vocal form of dissent possible is going out on your balcony to say "God is great" at a pre-arranged time, afraid even that will see you arrested and killed, your family arrested and beaten while you watch. NO enemy, foreign or domestic, will do that to my country while I breathe.