Quoting Reuters, quoting the WP (link):

The Bush administration is preparing plans for possible lifetime detention of suspected terrorists, including hundreds whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts …

… the Defense Department … plans to ask the U.S. Congress for $25 million to build a 200-bed prison to hold detainees who are unlikely to ever go through a military tribunal for lack of evidence

“… we are at a point in time where we have to say, ‘How do you deal with them in the long term?”‘ – Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman.

Have ‘we’ gone stark raving mad? Long term solutions are not incarceration, with over 2.9% of the adult US population in the ‘correctional population’ [1], (that’s 1 out of 32 Americans under correctional supervision [2]), I suppose it’s a model that has a certain familiarity, but what about all the drawbacks? Sadly the number of incarcerated adults has been growing. [3] Sigh.

It would hardly be original for me to point out that we might want to look at root-causes on our quest for the long term solution, not symptomatic treatments…