Donald Rumsfeld lays bare just how scary the Bush Administration can be when it comes to inconvenient concepts like the "rule of law". According to Rummy, it is unlikely that any of the "enemy combatants" being held at Guantanamo Bay will be tried before the end of the "War on Terror", which may itself stretch for decades. Actually, we apparently don't care whether they're innocent or not, Rummy says:

"Our interest is in not trying them and letting them out. Our interest is in -- during this global war on terror -- keeping them off the streets, and so that's what's taking place." [link]

Stunning. Of course, wiser men than I have considered this argument, and found it to be tantamount to tyrrany. Some of them, I'm told, even had a hand in writing a little document known as the Constitution of the United States of America, which used to prescribe what our government could and couldn't do. Here's what one of them (Alexander Hamilton) had to say:

"The observations of the judicious Blackstone, in reference to [the practice of arbitrary imprisonments] are worthy of recital: 'To bereave a man of life [says he] or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefor a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.'" -- Federalist 84 (quoting Blackstone's Commentaries, Vol. 1, p. 136).