Fixing terror laws and the economy

Easing them into life in this country would surely require halfway houses, rehabilitation and sponsors.

But if they can’t go home for fear of persecution, if no safe harbor can be found for them, what’s the alternative?

“We can’t just keep them in confinement forever,” says Hutson, now president and dean of the law school at Franklin Pierce University in Concord, New Hampshire.

It’s true that some disputed number of detainees released to other countries have since taken up arms. But you can’t keep people locked up on the chance they might cause problems later.

As for the really bad guys, the government must prove they are really bad to keep them behind bars.

Don¡¦t use military commissions to do it. They have earned nothing but scorn, not only from allies abroad but from officers involved in them. The former chief prosecutor publicly called the system politicized and rigged against detainees.

So, treat them as criminals. Seek indictments and try them in federal civilian court.

Federal judges have been sorting through classified information for decades. The Classified Information Protection Act of 1980, since amended, spells out how to handle the evidence.

As for information coerced from detainees by “enhanced” interrogation methods, civilian courts won’t consider evidence obtained through torture, nor should they.

Besides, how can anyone credit, say, a confession spurted out to save oneself from the feeling of drowning during waterboarding?

Making the prosecution abide by civilized rules of evidence doesn’t mean the worst of the worst would go free. Surely the government has developed admissible evidence against them.

On the off-chance a jury found the evidence insufficient, that doesn’t mean a terrorist would be set loose to launch attacks.

It means government agents will watch him around the clock, ready to stop any plot before it’s executed and arrest him and any co-conspirators.

The possibility that a guilty man might win acquittal is no reason to create a system that keeps innocent men in prison year after year.

These aren’t the sort of problems Treasury could ease by tossing a couple of hundred billion dollars at them. And yet, they are critical if Americans hope to regain whatever standing in the world we once had as a just, law-respecting people.

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