More reason to worry about Eric Holder

President-Elect Barack Obama may have promised to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, stop abusing the inmates and bring them within the bounds of a legitimate legal system for trial, but his pick for Attorney General is unlikely to be enthusiastic about that plan. Here's Eric Holder from a 2002 CNN interview, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal:

One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located; under the Geneva Convention that you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people.

It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves, however, that they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war. If, for instance, Mohamed Atta had survived the attack on the World Trade Center, would we now be calling him a prisoner of war? I think not. Should Zacarias Moussaoui be called a prisoner of war? Again, I think not.

It's going to be an interesting few years.