I'll wager Kruger and Dunning never met NotOrbitBoy and yet they have described him to a T(-bag):

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments

Justin Kruger and David Dunning
Cornell University

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

Read all about it: http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf

In brief, people like NOB are too stupid to realize how stupid they are.

It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense. (W. I. Miller, Humiliation [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1993], p. 4)

Not to worry — I wasn't singling you out for ridicule. You're just the first one who did it here since I got the post up. I mean even Digby did it this past week (http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/hair-trigger-by-digby-get-this-man.html), and if you can't trust D'Igby (h/t Presumptuous Insect) who can you trust.

So it's not your fault; it's just that it's done wrong much more often than it's done right. Sorry you had to take the first hit.

repeat ad nauseum
— Intercooler

A good Latin dictionary, or even a good English one can help cure that unsightly ignorance. In the meantime, here is first aid:

http://language-grammar.blogspot.com/2009/09/latin-for-bloggers.html#ad_nauseam

[Sorry for the blogwhoring, but if the commenters here are going to pass themselves off as intelligent, they should at least be seen to be making an effort in that direction.]

Except that Congress has already acted. As a (nominally) reputable state, the US is subject to the Geneva Conventions, which define the acceptable treatment of wartime captives very clearly. The US is subject to those laws both at home and abroad.

If Obama or anyone else wants to claim the authority to detain prisoners under presidential war powers, that means being subject to that entire legal framework.

It means that captives can't be interrogated, coerced, or tortured, nor can they be prosecuted simply for acts of war — because fighting for your own side in a war is not illegal.

It means that captives need to be identified, along with their rank and affiliation, and that organizations like the ICRC has free access to them.

It means that we are prepared to clearly state plausible circumstances under which the war we're fighting will end, after which everyone we've captured will be freed, and that we freely acknowledge that they can and will come back and fight us another day.

If that's what Obama ends up stuck with, that's fine with me. I think that's a stupid way to fight international crime, but then not being an expert I'm sure my opinion is naive.
— Amity

Yes, well, that's what all the folderol about "alien unlawful combatants" was all about. It was an attempt to deny captives in the "war on terror" their statutory protections under the Geneva Conventions. Indeed, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 attempted to legislate away Geneva Convention protections for "alien unlawful enemy combatants":

Sec. 948b. Military commissions generally

(g) Geneva Conventions Not Establishing Source of Rights— No alien unlawful enemy combatant subject to trial by military commission under this chapter may invoke the Geneva Conventions as a source of rights.

Furthermore, Congress also tried to legislate away constitutional protections for this category of persons:

(d) Inapplicability of Certain Provisions— (1) The following provisions of this title shall not apply to trial by military commission under this chapter:

(A) Section 810 (article 10 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice), relating to speedy trial, including any rule of courts-martial relating to speedy trial.

(B) Sections 831(a), (b), and (d) (articles 31(a), (b), and (d) of the Uniform Code of Military Justice), relating to compulsory self-incrimination.

(C) Section 832 (article 32 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice), relating to pretrial investigation.

Subsections (B) and (C) strip away the 5th Amendment guarantee of a grand jury investigation (an article 32 hearing is the UCMJ equivalent of a grand jury) and the 5th Amendment protection against self-incrimination, while subsection (A) takes away the right to a speedy trial guaranteed by the 6th Amendment.

Glenn is right when he says that turning Congress loose on detention is a recipe for draconian measures. Of course, we no longer have the 109th Congress that passed the abomination of the MCA, but neither the 110th nor the 111th Congress have made any effort to repeal it. One supposes they are just waiting for the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional, one section at a time.

Basically, if just one of those held at Guantánamo is a legitimate prisoner of war, then their treatment — incarceration, shackling, torture, coerced interrogation — amounts to war crimes. And regardless of whether they are POWs or not, their torture amounts to a crime against humanity no matter how frightened Americans are of another terrorist attack. "Home of the brave" — pfah!