Have you ever thought that there may be good reasons for limiting the access to some of these people?

The rules of warfare have changed. Ways of doing things that worked in WWII don't work that well any more. Used to be you would get a surrender, and the soldiers would turn in their guns, and go back to farming. You could let the POWs go home, and they would go back to their lives. If fifty of them decided to keep fighting, with their guns and grenades, they could kill a few people, but eventually they would be brought to heel. In the nine months since Iraq fell, all the Iraqi insurgents together have managed to kill about 220 Americans, the equivalent of a single company of soldiers. Not good, but certainly not a massacre either.

In the war on terror, we are dealing with people willing to strap death to their bodies to kill as many of the enemy as possible. Hell, people who will strap bombs to their children to kill as many of the enemy as possible. An army comprised of kamikazes, who don't even need planes, but have the potential to wipe out a town with something carried in a shoebox. Nineteen people with boxcutters killed 3,000 people and wrecked part of Manhattan, killing an order of magnitude more people in hours as the entire Iraqi insurgency has killed in nine months with conventional weapons.

There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that had these people had access to a thermonuclear weapon, they would have killed millions. If they had had access to something that would have wiped out every man, woman and child in the U.S., they would have used it without a second thought.

A POW released in this war will be back. You are not dealing with people who will put a war behind them and go back to farming. Imagine a WWII prisoner of war camp where every last one of thousands of German prisoners thinks exactly like Adolph Hitler.

And they don't wear uniforms, or carry ID badges, or have distinctive tattoos.

The rules have changed, and the government is trying to adapt. This is all new territory. They are doing some things well. No doubt they are screwing up on others. Are they handling the prisoners right? Or the detainees? Maybe, maybe not. The point is, you can't just treat this as though these people are harmless, considering what they can do when they are not. These aren't American citizens, they either overstayed visas or entered the country illegally, and this isn't Miranda territory any more.

I do know that since 9/11, we have not been attacked. Maybe this means we have just been lucky. Maybe it means the methods used to defend us are working. Maybe a bit of both.

Frankly, considering the provocation, I consider it amazing that we have behaved as civilly as we have, both domestically and overseas. We could just as easily have erased Afghanistan from the face of the Earth, or reduced Iraq to non-resisting rubble. And many nations would have simply executed captured Taliban or Revolutionary Guards on site.

It is admirable that you have sympathy, and that you worry about the rights of all people. But there are some of those people who would jam a knife into your gut as you were handing them a food package. I still remember the terrorist's comment when he snuck past an American soldier who let him go because he said his wife was ill in the hospital. "Stupid Americans."