I'm sorry to have caused you so much frustration. Thank you for deigning, in spite of my muddle-headedness, to attempt to enlighten me.

You say: "The Obama administration's position, much like the administration before it, seems to be that even people who are not grabbed from an active theater of war may be whisked away to Bagram and kept there indefinitely..."

My point was, and is, that a lot of people are making judgments based on what they believe things seem to be. I have not seen anything from the Obama administration that convinces me that he or they approve of snatching just any old taxi driver off the street because he has the same last name as someone dangerous. As I understood matters, the Bush folks had no trouble doing this, and frequently did so, leaving themselves stuck with innocent people they couldn't afford to let go because their innocence would become known to the world. Neither you nor Glenn G. have convinced me that Obama's giving himself the same latitude for abducting anyone he feels like abducting -- latitude that no one is arguing that Bush did not give himself. Maybe time will prove that you're entirely right, but at the moment, you're stuck at "seems to be..."

Then you say that I'm : "...[begging] the question of how a supposedly limited government and its people are supposed to know that this is the case when there is no fair process in place to do so." All I can say is that once the battle is joined, there will be injustices on both sides. No doubt there were prisoners in both American and German POW camps who, if they had been provided a forum, might have convinced reasonable people that they did not belong there. It's pointless to argue that the world is not as perfect as it should be. Both these "wars" should never have been started; Obama has taken the reins mid-stream and yes, for the moment I choose to trust him. Believe me, the moment he gives me reason to howl, I will howl. But you and Glenn and others are speculating, as near as I can see, and given the vast improvement in leadership we are experiencing, I have to wonder why your speculations run from the distrusting to the downright cynical, given that you're stuck, as I said before, at "...seems as if..."

Absolutely. Everything I said (right or wrong) was in the context that Bush's illegal, murderous and ultimately fruitless response to the 9/11 attacks has already taken place and that as a result there are in fact enemy soldiers out there. If it was up to me, every single U.S. soldier deployed anywhere in the world would be brought home tomorrow.

Glenn talks repeatedly about "people" being “abducted.” Charlie Savage is a little more specific by referring to them as "military prisoners."

The way I understand it, if a person takes up arms against the United States and fights our soldiers as part of an organized group (though maybe not organized by our principles of military organization) -- maybe called an army, maybe called something else, but grouped together for the purpose of fighting our soldiers -- then such a person, when captured, is a prisoner of war. That person cannot be said to have been "abducted" and has no habeas corpus rights, any more than Hogan's Heroes did, nor the British troops in "The Bridge on the River Kwai". By taking up arms expressly for doing battle, such persons acknowledge that the other guys aren't going to treat them with kid gloves in the event of capture. There are the Geneva Conventions, which prevent "military prisoners" from being enslaved or massacred and which require that such prisoners be kept in some minimal state of health and comfort. But beyond that, nothing.

My understanding has always been that the Bush administration literally abducted people who were not soldiers by anyone's definition, but who were simply associated with someone undesirable (a chauffeur, for example) or felt for some vague and not necessarily expressible reason to be "a threat." These people should definitely have rights above and beyond what a captured soldier (combatant, whatever label you want to use) is accorded by the Conventions. There's no reason those rights should not include an opportunity to confront the charges and attempt to explain or refute or whatever.

I wonder if Glenn and others are conflating these two classes of captive: the clearly military and the clearly "abducted civilian." It seems to me so. It seems to me that Obama is rightfully maintaining the government's right to imprison enemy soldiers (combatants, etc.) but I have a very hard time believing that Obama wants the right to abduct people who are not expressly in the business of fighting our soldiers, or who have been fingered as terrorists by paid informants with no corroborating evidence.

Of course, BushCo also “abducted people” they genuinely believed to be terrorists, but against whom they didn’t have the kind of evidence you need to prosecute crimes in the courts of the United States. And perhaps Obama finds himself in the same situation; one would hope our new president, with communication skills far superior to Bush’s and an honesty quotient that leaves Bush in the dust, would be able to tell us what he’s doing and why. Perhaps he will some day soon. But I don’t think it’s helpful to loudly equate what he’s doing with what Bush did, lumping “people” and “enemy combatants” into one group and hollering because they aren’t all treated the same.