Demands to close Gitmo detention center

HERE is the report of protesters calling for the detention centers for terrorists to be closed.

NEW YORK - Feminist author Gloria Steinem on Monday joined about 200 protesters to demand the closure of the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, saying holding prisoners indefinitely without charging them violates the values upon which the United States was founded.

Now, a couple of questions. What are we to do with these persons? Do we put them into the general population of our current prisons, further taxing the resources there?

Do the protesters really understand that these persons are not criminals, but deadly enemies of our culture? Since prisoners at Gitmo have been released in the past, perhaps there is a different kind of due process that is at work.

Those who call for due process for terrorists are guilty of confusing the nature of the terror network. Terror is not a criminal act, simply. It is, instead, a political act of war declared by those who have no legal standing in the world.

Without being combatants of a legal country and without status as citizens or resident aliens, a terrorist has placed himself or herself into a murky category. They have human rights, but their legal status is quite suspect, because of the status they have placed themselves in.

A better approach is to keep insisting that the military continue to be accountable to the public for the treatment of the terrorists. But that does not mean recognizing them as having the same kind of legal status that we afford criminals.