"Perversion of the courts"

Ed Morrissey The new humane: killing terrorists instead of capturing them.

Quoting David Ignatius

Every war brings its own deformations, but consider this disturbing fact about America’s war against al-Qaeda: It has become easier, politically and legally, for the United States to kill suspected terrorists than to capture and interrogate them. …

Morrissey:

This isn’t a deformation of war; it’s a deformation of politics. And it really isn’t directly related to the enhanced interrogation techniques at all, but to the insistence of political leadership and the federal courts to insist on a jurisdiction that flies in the face of two centuries of American military and legal tradition. Pushing terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ahmed Ghailani through federal courts perverts the normal operation of war, especially by imposing the same kind of legal liabilities used to restrict law enforcement in regard to American citizens and residents.

We have made it more costly and more difficult to capture terrorists, a task with plenty of difficulty already. Once we capture them, the courts and this administration have made it clear that they have to be treated like a suspect in a criminal investigation rather than a foreign enemy of war....

The problem is not just that interrogation is now problematic, it's not just a question of how but where:

We’re not killing terrorists rather than capturing them because we’re restricting interrogation to the Army Field Manual, which has nothing to do with later adjudication; we’re killing them because we have no real rational place to put them. That’s due entirely to Obama’s detention policies and the judiciary’s arrogation of jurisdiction. Thanks to the mess created by the Holder DoJ, we have no way to process them even if we did.

Easier to kill them. The courts, Holder and the law professors still allow that.