Apparently there are really just two ways to deal with terrorism; militarily (the prefered US method) and by means of law enforcement (favoured by Canada and Western EU).
Are EUers and Canadians doing better? There have been no dramatic terrorist attacks in Canada, yet. Canada does have a large immigrant Muslim community which shares many of the features suspects caught in the EU have. Are law enforcement in the EU sharing the relevant information quickly and easily enough? Immigration is a feature and shared by the overwhelming majority of identified terrorists, all are traveled, transplanted, in an alien environment. But there were terrorist attacks post 911 in the EU, wouldn't this suggest US law enforcement is doing better than some of their western EU counterparts.
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These people they capture are not uniformed soldiers and some are just grabbed on the streets. In a situation like that you need to be even MORE careful you have the right people.
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The military is definitely not as adept at the formalities in criminal procedure, as the police have been trained to be. That reference to evidence gathering is very helpful, it provides a bit of context to how things really went down (though in hundreds of other cases there may have been greedy bounty-hunters and vindictive in-laws turning in innocent bystanders). Military intelligence is a rather simple process, everyone is handled like a "suspect", nobody is in uniform, all of them do look alike and even their names sound very similar.
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it would seem we NEED some kind of mechanism to prevent such errors, and if not to prevent them then to FIX them as quickly as possible.
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With the Guantanamo immates the shared features of the captives (aside from their religion) is that they were allegedly caught on the battlefield and were not of that country nor in any recognized armed force. These features would be suspicious, a wounded Egyptian or Yemenite with a machine gun captured after mopping up would be subject to aditional scrutiny. Last I heard over 50 different nationalities were shared by immates in Guantanamo.
In Afghanistan (where lots of Guantanamo immates were caught) there were Al Qaeda training camps, they stored weapons, coordinated communications. Camps were attacked and prisoners taken, terrorists or aspiring ones in training did actually engage US armed forces. But there was that bounty business and the Pakistanis turned in hordes, from which notorious cases abuse of process, malicious prosecution and wrongful arrest have arisen. So we see the shortcomings of an excessively militaristic approach, but they did destroy those bases, OBL went into hiding, lots of highly likely terrorists were killed and plenty captured. But many of them have been questioned in a manner unacceptable from the police.
No case could be successfully brought against any of them in a conventional criminal procedure, the evidence would be dismissed, the coerced confession is worthless. There have been cases of successful leads to further arrests from 'fingering' terrorists who yield under questioning and 'rat' on their co-conspirators -cases against those 'ratted on' (regardless of the quality of any other evidence against them) would have to be dismissed as well (fruit of the poisonous tree).
There are all sorts of jurisdictional problems relating to the documentation and custody of evidence conditioning its admissibility. Most of the countries from which suspects hail do not have legal institutions susceptible to recognition by any US Federal Court and this precludes application of the "full faith and credit" to judicial determinations emanating from many of them -which in turn could preclude admissibility of evidence.
In addition to all of this, the crime charged in these cases involves an international criminal conspiracy and conspiracies are notoriously difficult to prove -even for proper law enforcement with all the evidence in their jurisdiction and an apprehensive, but talkative suspect in custody.
So the Bush administration figured the legal was a mess, but they could hold the suspects extraterritorially while they worked out those details. They should have thought this out better? Should they have anticipated jihadees would be caught alive? How risky is it to have suspected members of an international criminal conspiracy in custody in any jail within the US? Is there some risk an airliner would crash into the prison to silence the potential source?
We've never seen anything like this before, how is a conventional armed force supposed to deal with criminal suspects? Should they have had a battery of JAG officers programming prosecutions -as though the suspects were members of an armed force? If the suspected crime is of local jurisdiction the normal procedure is to turn any suspects in to local law enforcement for his prosecution, but in an international terrorist criminal conspiracy this would be ill advised. In Afghanistan it is estimated up to 40 thousand Pakistanis captured in suspected terrorist camps died suffocated in containers abandoned by the local warlords in the desert -so maybe the local law enforcement couldn't be counted on and you can see how that "full faith and credit" bit goes out the window.