Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey has this op-ed in the WSJ.

The plan was disrupted because we were lucky enough to have the key witness in detention. It's a shame we didn't try to extract similar intelligence from Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.

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The government seems to present us only with the choice that we kill [terrorists] with drones or give them Miranda warnings and access to a 24-karat justice system designed for conventional criminals. There are better ways, including but not limited to military commissions already provided by law but shunned by the administration, or other special- purpose tribunals that can be established by Congress.

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We will not always be so fortunate to have our would-be attackers detained by the military at Bagram. And even such detention may be the subject of further litigation if the Supreme Court agrees to review last spring's appellate decision denying habeas corpus to detainees at Bagram. Yet as recently as World War II this country held tens of thousands of war prisoners here and abroad without a single one of them being allowed to require his custodians to answer to a U.S. court.

For us, today, the lesson is clear. The importance of being able to gather human intelligence has never been more starkly demonstrated than in the capture and questioning of Ahmed Sidiqi, and the resulting drone attack. The former director of the CIA, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, has likened trying to survive on electronic intelligence alone to trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle without looking at the picture on the box. It is human intelligence that provides that picture.

Like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians, we seem tied down; unlike Gulliver, we have woven and tied the strings ourselves.