The U.S. government is arguing that the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay can be held indefinitely, without charges or access to a lawyer, because they are "aliens held outside U.S. territory and therefore are not entitled to rights granted by the Constitution" (for the full AP story, click here).
So, they are not protected under the Constitution because they are not in America--and have not defined what jurisdiction Guantanamo does fall under. They are not protected under the Geneva Convention because they are not prisoners of war; they are "enemy combatants" in a war that has no forseeable end.
By fiat, our government has defined people, places, and situations in such a way that no rules apply to them. There is no way for us to even determine whether they have done something wrong. Perhaps they have, and if so, they deserve to have a public declaration of who they are and why they have spent two years in no-man's land. They are stuck in limbo, while those of us who put them there have not only extinguished the light at the end of the tunnel, we are finding ways to deny that the tunnel even exists.
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