I think incarcerated aliens deserve recognition and protection of the inborn rights derived from their Creator, that one of these rights is an entitlement to a form of due process.
I agree with position #3, though I would say "justice" rather than "due process", since one is a Biblical term and the other is rooted in Anglo-American jurisprudence.
I am personally opposed to imprisonment as a form of punishment. There is no Biblical support for imprisonment; offenders performed restitution instead. Prison is acceptable as a temporary holding place until a verdict is reached in a trial, but it shouldn't be a part of the sentence.
Regarding the guys at Gitmo, the feds should mete justice one way or the other, whether it's execution, or slave labour to pay off a monetary debt, or letting them go free; simply imprisoning them indefinitely without any sort of endgame in sight is not justice by any definition.
The 3rd position is the correct one, I also think.
When we had so many people from overseas to the north coming from SE Asia, our previous prime minister John Howard and his admin saw to it that those same people did not actually set foot in the country, choosing instead to process them through places like Christmas Island in the West Aussie area and other places in the E. states. Though of course the left were wringing their hands over it, I think it was the best middle ground - allowing the right depts a chance to check whether they were indeed refugees. As it turned out, many were not, and were returned to their country of origin. It worked to a good degree, as the number of people trying to come in illegally dried up to a trickle.
It's easier to just haul them before a normal federal or military court and try them like that. Unless you want to create a new legal system to handle them.
Besides, as I have said before, your citizenship grants you no rights except over the body politic, Wes. It is a conservative myth that there is any "citizen" right in the Bill of Rights. Everything in the Bill of Rights is a restriction on government power.
There is another issue at stake here as well, and that's that the President has declared that he has the right to arbitrarily designate anyone on US soil as an enemy combatant, and thus deny them Habeas Corpus. One thing is actually quite clear, and that's that our founding fathers, from the actual text they wrote in the Constitution, intended the suspension of Habeas Corpus to occur only in times of full-blown war. Meaning when the Iranians land 50,000 members of the Revolutionary Guard on our territory, not when a few pissants blow up some targets on our soil.
Triton, I find no fault in your analysis.
Morris, good to see you. 
Mike, I agree that the document limits government power; but it does more than that. It also deals with American citizenship privileges. If we share the notion that human rights come from God (and I believe we do agree on this), then such rights exist regardless the Constitution's application or inapplication to us as individuals. That humans have a right to due process doesn't automatically translate to an identical form of due process as that bestowed upon American citizens. If we apply the Constitution to non-citizens, we make them de facto citizens.
Mike, I agree that the document limits government power; but it does more than that. It also deals with American citizenship privileges. If we share the notion that human rights come from God (and I believe we do agree on this), then such rights exist regardless the Constitution's application or inapplication to us as individuals. That humans have a right to due process doesn't automatically translate to an identical form of due process as that bestowed upon American citizens. If we apply the Constitution to non-citizens, we make them de facto citizens.
You're ignoring the text of much of the Bill of Rights to make that point, Wes. The legal difference between a citizen and a non-citizen on US soil is that the citizen has political power that the non-citizen does not have. That is where God-given rights end, and citizen's rights begin.
I know you're torn about this, but consider this. If the President can wield war powers against terrorists, then there is no stopping the President from always acting like a full wartime president. That is a nightmare scenario for our civil liberties. If you want an idea of the scenario that I see happening eventually, research how jack-booted this country was during WWI. We made Mussolini proud (no exaggeration, he considered us a kindred nation in politics).
I would have far less sympathy for the SCOTUS ruling if the Congress had actually declared war, but it didn't. It pussyfooted around and gave the President an "authorization to use force" which, in my estimation, is the sort of rubber stamp that the Senate gave Caesar.
You're ignoring the text of much of the Bill of Rights to make that point, Wes. The legal difference between a citizen and a non-citizen on US soil is that the citizen has political power that the non-citizen does not have. That is where God-given rights end, and citizen's rights begin.
I don't see how I'm ignoring the Bill of Rights, since it's an integral facet of a document written for the protection of American citizens, not all men on Earth. The U.S. has a long history of treating aliens differently from citizens, in matters of due process; George Washington himself conducted military tribunals during wartime, when dealing with captured British soldiers.
As I said before, to say that a man has a right to due process is quite a different animal from insisting that he has a right to an American citizen's version of due process--including a civil trial on American soil, a civilian lawyer, a group of twelve American civilians called upon to serve as his jury, and a very generous appeals process.
The idea that these people deserve treatment indistinguishable from that of U.S citizens is a fairly recent innovation of American jursiprudence.
BTW, please don't mistake anything I've said as support for our current overseas military misadventure. I see my comments as having a general application, as opposed to a specific one to this situation alone.
I agree on WWI; the same nonsense happened in WWII. I also agree that Congress was far less straight-forward in its support of the war than it should've been. And still is, for that matter.
I don't recall saying that they are entitled to the same exact process. What I said is that the Bill of Rights applies to those who are brought before a US court. As I have said before, name a single thing from the Bill of Rights that you would take away from them. A "speedy and public trial" can take place in the middle of Guantanimo Bay with only other servicemen sitting in on the trial, for example. There are plenty of ways to limit the practical applications for security reasons without giving up the fundamental restrictions on state power.
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