In today’s North Korea – and in the bygone days of the Soviet Union – prisoners deemed enemies of the state just disappear.

They are shipped off to gulag-style prisons and concentration camps where they are “re-educated,” worked hard and stored until their eventual death.

Reports over the weekend in the Washington Post paint an unflattering and distressing picture of the United States and the development of its own secret prison system where detainees in the “war on terror” could be warehoused for the rest of their lives.

According to the report, the Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to develop an approach for the lifetime detention of prisoners. Many of them are being held without enough evidence for the government to mount a criminal prosecution or pass the oversight of a military tribunal.

Fearful that the prisoners, if released, could take up arms against the United States, the military and intelligence agencies are looking for a way to indefinitely keep them out of circulation without allowing access to due process.

One idea is to build prisons in other countries, namely Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia or Yemen, where the prisoners could be held without interference from civil rights organizations and with immunity from U.S. law. Additionally, the military is seeking to build a $25 million facility in Guantanamo Bay to hold long-term detainees who no longer have useful information.

Such a system of U.S.-financed, secret prisons clearly violates the Geneva Conventions, U.S. law and the provisions of guaranteed due process established in the Constitution. As one CIA officer said in the Post story, “It’s not rendering to justice, it’s kidnapping.”

Details of how the CIA captures and detains prisoners are kept secret. There’s been no public debate on how these people are treated, how long they are kept and how or if they are ever to be released. Without divulging specific information about who is in custody, that debate needs to take place.

We understand the demands are created in fighting terrorists. But a free society cannot toss out its ideals without paying a price. Prisoners, even accused terrorists, deserve due process. Otherwise, we risk joining the list of tyrannical states that are feared, but not respected.