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<v ->I have a problem with staying at war</v>

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and not having law of war detention.

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I don't think that's a morally responsible position

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for a country to have.

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Then what you end up with is an incentive to kill.

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I mean, imagine you hand a rifle to a 19-year-old soldier,

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and say, "You, here's some marksmanship training.

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"We're at war.

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"You have legal authority to kill another human being.

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"You can also capture that human being

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"in some circumstances,

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"but if you capture them,

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"if you wanna continue detaining them,

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"you better have proof beyond a reasonable doubt

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"that they committed some crime in the past."

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Well, you've just incentivized killing,

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and it should disturb us all that with the drawdown of,

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we don't have any new people going to Guantanamo,

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but we have a clear uptick

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in the number of drone strikes, for instance.

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I think that disparity is something that should concern us.

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My biggest concern is not so much

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that we don't close Guantanamo fast enough.

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I totally get why we need to do that

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from a foreign relations perspective.

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I totally get why.

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More important, I think,

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is having principled, credible detaining policies

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wherever we detain people,

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and I think we have and are doing that,

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and I would like to talk about

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some of the accomplishments, I think,

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but I think where I'm most concerned

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is that we enter into a state of quasi-war that's perpetual.

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Not perpetual detention,

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indefinite detention is part of any war,

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but it ends with the end of the war.

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My concern is that we become too comfortable

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with the war we're fighting,

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by minimizing the number of people in Guantanamo,

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and the competent criticism of it.

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By reducing the number of drone strikes,

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but still having them.

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And then we enter a state

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where we're constantly in a little bit of war.

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Where we can do a very sanitized drone strike

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in a far-off location,

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we don't feel the concept that war is hell,

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war becomes a little more like purgatory instead of hell.

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And we become too comfortable with it.