Treat your detainees respectfully.

For anyone taken into custody on the battlefield, the war is over.

Whatever you thought was a cause worth fighting for, and maybe dying for, is done. You're in the hands of your enemy, and they have total control over you. As a prisoner, you hope you have some rights -- to a lawyer, to certain rules various nations have agreed on -- but really, you're at the mercy of your captors. They can suspend all those rights, claiming that you're an "enemy combatant," seized on "the field of battle," and they can put you in a room and do pretty much anything they want to you. What a horror show! Aren't you sorry you surrendered?

Yes, this is about what we're doing right now to detainees taken in "the war on terrorism", but no, it's not political. It's neither Democrat or Republican. It's a matter of human rights. When you're arrested -- whether on "the field of battle" or in your own neighborhood -- you hope to be treated humanely, and you hope to retain certain rights.

But there is another consideration here. If you're suspected of being a terrorist, and if your normal human rights are suspended because "national interest" becomes a factor, then we, the nation, the people, have to decide what is the best way to get vital information from you about your supposed plans to subvert our government and our way of life and maybe kill lots of us, as happened on 9/11. You may be a special case.

The easy/traditional way to extract information from you is to torture you. To make you so uncomfortable that you will tell us, your captors, what we want to know. And we have ways of making you extremely uncomfortable.

The problem, though, is that what you tell us in the end may be a result of you saying what you think we want to hear just to end your suffering. And, of course, that kind of information may prove to be useless. (We can always come back and kill you if we think we need to and claim that you were trying to escape or whatever, but we've still lost whatever you might have told us.)

I heard not long ago a military interrogation expert from an earlier time say that he had gotten his best, and most reliable, information from detainees that he'd befriended, in a real and honest way: he'd listened to them and argued with them and, in the end, won them over to his/our way of thinking. It made such sense to me that I'm amazed/appalled that we still try to torture our captured foes into telling us anything of any value. I suspect I would say anything just to stop the pain, wouldn't you?

The simple fact is that all those people we've detained and still hold in custody after the horrific events of 9/11 were likely rounded up out of a national over-reaction. We penned them up and didn't give them access to lawyers -- maybe didn't even charge them with anything. Some of them have been deprived of their freedom for five years or more. Due process be damned!

I have no idea whether those people held are guilty or not. But we have an obligation, as a civilized country, to be sure they are treated well and have recourse to our legal system.
Anyone accused of anything wrong in this country gets to have a lawyer, right?

I think a country is, ultimately, judged by just a few criteria: how it treats its poor; how it treats its children; how it treats its disabled; how it treats its detainees.

You tell me what score you would give the U.S. right now on these criteria. It has nothing to do with one party or the other but with human decency. Try them, in a court of law, or let them go.