But my point was that Brynhildur Hagarsdottir, a housewife in Reykjavik, is not entitled to the protections of the US Constitution. She has no call on its rights, cannot insist on her freedoms or her government's constraints based on its terms. KSM is not a "US person" in any sense, is not a citizen or resident in the US, and is not being held in the US. He's not even a visitor. To bring him here so that he becomes entitled to some of those rights is a political judgment that I believe is misguided. (my bold)

I told you it was all about rights and "significant U.S. presence". At root, that's the torturer's argument. These people were never put in Guantánamo, Bagram, Kandahar, or even Kohat and Haripur or any of the black sites because of the danger they posed to Americans by bringing them to the American homeland. They were put there as part of an intelligence gathering operation, Dick Cheney explicitly said so at the time. They were deliberately put in a "legal black hole", or to use the more international law verbiage, they were subject to enforced disappearance and incommunicado detention -- to wit, creating a place for prisoners beyond the law. The U.S. was party to a declaration against that at the U.N. in 1992, and that's why the Bush administration argued in France in 2004 to try to water down, and then refused to sign, the CPPED, the treaty that bans exactly that, in harsh language with just the same lack of loopholes as the CAT.

That's what it always was about, that's what it is about, and that's what you're about, too: denying access to a substantial U.S. presence in order to deny rights to people the government wants to, or has, subjected to illegal interrogations: illegal under CAT, illegal under Geneva, and illegal under ICCPR, the Constitution, and U.S. Code.

Game over.

And no, you don't get to apply the laws of war because of a declaration, only because of a conflict.

My point is he was never subject to indefinite detention, and his 30 years in British prison were not as a result of being a POW. When the war was over, he needed to face trial or be released.

Maybe you don't understand this, but there needs to be a conflict for duration of conflict. An armed conflict, in a conflict zone, with a battlefield. Not just a resolution from Congress.

Most of the prisoners who came over the border in 2001 were arrested in a conflict that ended in 2001. Duration of conflict does not support their incarceration at all. KSM was not arrested on any battlefield whatsoever, and part of the reason for foreign participation in his arrest is that he had a substantial pre-September 11 rap sheet for criminal terrorist offenses. He is held by the country that is indicting him and had already indicted him in 1998, his crimes were all considered civilian until the Bush administration tried to rewrite the rules.

There is no valid argument why most of the people at Guantanamo should be tried in military proceedings, and if they were, there is every international law reason why those proceedings would be courts martial with all the rights and guarantees. You, and all others arguing for a new addition to the court system with your Article III babble are basically afraid of giving due process to defendants. As I mentioned, the argument stems directly from Mr. Yoo, and his arguments stem from an attempted end run around the Convention Against Torture.