I am a former soldier, not a lawyer. I view the recent majority rulings of our Supreme Court concerning unlawful combatants such as in Hamdi, Rasul, Hamdan, and Boumediene as adding, not detracting, to the bloody chaos of war. In addition, the entire debate about using intelligence as evidence against the unlawful combatants, even that which was derived by coercive techniques, is flawed. Perhaps we should not pull the wings off flies like Salim Ahmed Hamdan and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed during this War on Terror but misery should be an unlawful combatants only lot in life.

Beyond extending our Constitution protections to non-citizens outside our borders and territories, we have ceded legal protections to unlawful combatants that wholly operate outside modern civilization’s Laws of Wars. Lawyers, including many who have worn military uniforms for decades, seem to have lost all sight of why those laws evolved and deliberately left unlawful combatants unprotected.