Critical Brain Candy

Maybe someone can help enlighten me?

So, he’s being sentenced today: Khadr threw grenade to kill ‘many Americans’.  But I’ve never really understood the decisions for what to do with these prisoners.

Looking back for some context, there’s some info on Wikipedia about POWs after WW2.  It looks like the allies kept the Germans imprisoned and used them as forced labour, but it doesn’t indicate what the final outcome was.  Were they all eventually let back home?

It seems a bit odd to be prosecuting someone who is effectively an enemy soldier for fighting in combat.  This idea obviously doesn’t scale to a large conflict, where there could be thousands of such prisoners.  Maybe the difference is that after a traditional conflict it’s less threatening to eventually let the losing side go home, since there’s little incentive to continue fighting.  In this case the fighters are less tied to a specific nation but more an ideology (supposedly, maybe they just want people to stop messing with them?)

It seems the historical precedent would be to just kill the POWs, so I guess this is an improvement at least.

I’ll gladly apologize for poking fun if this actually comes true today: Retired NORAD Officer’s New Book Predicts a Tentative Worldwide UFO Display on October 13, 2010

Some details:

“The author draws upon his military experience with the UFO phenomenon dating back to WW2, and later, with NORAD and his subsequent life-long association with a senior NORAD intelligence officer who provided him a wealth of historical data relating to NORAD’s experience with the UFO/alien reality which has never been revealed to the public. In the military’s view, as conveyed to and understood by Fulham, the public is not yet ready to accept an alien reality.”