Ralph Peters:

We made one great mistake regarding Guantanamo: No terrorist should have made it that far. All but a handful of those grotesquely romanticized prisoners should have been killed on the battlefield.

The few kept alive for their intelligence value should have been interrogated secretly, then executed.

Terrorists don’t have legal rights or human rights. By committing or abetting acts of terror against the innocent, they place themselves outside of humanity’s borders. They must be hunted as man-killing animals.

And, as a side benefit, dead terrorists don’t pose legal quandaries.

Captured terrorists, on the other hand, are always a liability. Last week, President Obama revealed his utter failure to comprehend these butchers when he characterized Guantanamo as a terrorist recruiting tool.

Gitmo wasn’t any such thing. Not the real Gitmo. The Guantanamo Obama believes in is a fiction of the global media. With rare, brief exceptions, Gitmo inmates have been treated far better than US citizens in our federal prisons.

But the reality of Gitmo was irrelevant — the left needed us to be evil, to “reveal” ourselves as the moral equivalent of the terrorists. So they made up their Gitmo myths.

Really, Ralph.  Can’t you just give me a little while to craft my own views without having you surreptitiously undercut me by publishing my prose first?  Honestly, I was very nearly about to craft such a commentary, but framed about prisons in counterinsurgency and criminal prosecutions of pirates.

Ralph launches his diatribe from the framework of Gitmo, and while I concur exactly with his views, I also advocate such an approach to reducing the number of prisons necessary in counterinsurgency operations.  Certainly, there are local “accidental guerrillas” (as they are called by Kilcullen) who we need to identify and attempt to sway, rehabilitate or otherwise turn to our advantage.

But as for the hard core, ideologically motivated fighters, rather than overcrowd the local prisons with bad actors who will only be released into the population to continue their activities, it is better that they be killed on the field of battle.  In many ways, their surrender is the worst of all options.  Their surrender means countless lawyer-hours, evidence-gathering, constabulary work, judicial work, prison construction, attempted rehabilitation, and ultimately release to conduct the same activities again.

The same goes for pirates, who even throughout history have been able to escape justice by claiming forced conscription.  Finally, we have better things to do with our money and lawyers’ time than to chase the legalities of piracy in order to stamp out the practice.  Better to kill the pirates on the high seas.  When it reaches the point that we are capturing the pirates rather than killing them, or sending SEALs to save hostages, it has gone too far.  The focus of the fight is misplaced.