Is this why we’re still at war?

Marcy Wheeler:

Almost nine years ago, a British embassy official recorded the consensus among American and British officials that the plausibility that we were still at war would affect whether we could legally hold detainees for long periods without trial.

Nine years later, just a handful of the men ultimately captured have had a trial. Our sole claim to still be at war–aside from the Administration’s attempts to stretch the terms of the AUMF–are the 50 al Qaeda members still in Afghanistan. And on that basis, we still hold hundreds of men without trial.

You see, from the start this war was designed to be our longest war. Because all those Commander-in-Chief powers both Republicans and Democrats have grown to love so much depend on it continuing.

Our men and women are risking their lives in Afghanistan at this point to make indefinite detention more legally “plausible.”