Did Yemen look the other way as terrorists escaped its jail as a protest against aid cutoff? How should prisoners be treated? 

Certainly, this sort of gamesmanship is practiced throughout the region. American aid in return for help on the terror front. When aid was cut back, terrorists "escaped." A linkage and a message? As Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe wrote last week, there is a "fallacy of life in prison" since so many prisoners actually serve a fraction of the time they are sentenced. Such prisoners often have their sentences reduced or they are pardoned.

Israel has released prisoners as a way to help bolster Mahmoud Abbas. These prisoners have gone back to supporting terror operations — despite promises that they would not do so.  Abbas himself has released prisoners that he had promised to detain. And when international observers have been put in place on the West Bank to monitor imprisoned terrorists, they have been run off because of attacks and threats.

Prisoners released from Guantanamo due to pressure from the "human rights" community have resumed their old ways of planning and committing attacks. Human rights groups and opportunistic politicians have restricted the methods that might be used to garner intelligence from captured suspects. 

The death penalty is, for the most part, off the table for terrorists because Europe and the international community abhor the idea of the death penalty. A soldier is likely to get in trouble for killing a wounded terrorist because he legitimately feels that the wound might be feigned and that the terrorist will try to kill him. A soldier is also very likely to get in trouble for mishandling a prisoner and violating his rights. 

If terror suspects are jailed, they become an endless public relations problem for America—and we are compelled to expend considerable financial resources to keep them in jail. Now jails sentences  themselves have become a fiction. Perhaps we should just recognize about how these disincentives work. The human rights groups that support terrorists are creating incentives to...well...let's call it like it is...just kill terror suspects.

Ed Lasky   2 11 06