Internment without trial does not undermine either democracy or its values. Tough measures are aimed only at very few suspects; only 11 are currently detained in Britain, only a few hundred at Guantanamo Bay. Exceptional circumstances call for special measures, but these are so limited in scope that they do not threaten our democratic values. Similarly, until the cessation of hostilities, the suspension of habeus corpus for ‘enemy combatants’ is not unlike the holding of prisoners of war until an armistice, whereby it is not legally necessary to provide recourse to judicial process. As Dick Cheney notes, ‘in previous wars we’ve always exercised the right to capture the enemy and then hold them until the end of the conflict. The same principle ought to apply here’ 1.  1. Trott, B. (2008, December 15). Don't Close Guantanamo until terror war ends: Cheney. Retrieved May 12, 2011, from Reuters: