I have to point out that treating illegal combatants -those whose actions preclude being given POW status - humanely in accord with Geneva and the Torture conventions in no way preclude us for trying and executing them for the commission of war crimes.

The USG is fully within it's sovereign rights to try terrorists simply for being members of al Qaida, proscribing it as an outlaw organization as we once did with the SS, Gestapo, SD and other Nazi affiliates. Especially, trials for fighting out of uniform, for deliberately targeting civilians, for the wanton murder of injured American soldiers on the battlefield, streamlined military trials are justified under international law, the laws of war ( as saboteurs) and Ex Parte Quirin. The recent SCOTUS decision pointed, in fact, to Ex Parte Quirin as the appropriate model and not the vague, shifting, arguments offered by the Bush administration..

In the latter examples, the death penalty is both reasonable and an appropriate outcome upon conviction, barring any mitigating circumstances in terms of cooperation on intelligence matters. As this option could not be, legally and historically speaking, more clear, I can only conclude that the Bush administration, as an act of policy, seeks to avoid any kind of trials indefinitely or at least until they can drop the issue in the next administration's lap.