The greatest gift

I will admit that on the afternoon of 11 September 2001 itself, I was all for a short, persuasive drop of tactical nuclear weapons somewhere over North Waziristan.

By the next day, though, I came back to my senses and have ever since believed that the very best way that this country can respond to terrorism is not with weapons but with words -- specifically, the words of the U.S. Constitution that guarantee due process. It is, as Nat Hentoff once observed, the greatest gift that American democracy has given to humankind. It prevents the government from doing whatever it wants with you whenever it wants to. Had a lawyer like, oh, I don't know, Al Gore, been president on 9/11, the United States would have sent in the Marines to round up all the bad guys we could find in Afghanistan, brought them back to the delightful confines of Sing Sing and held them until trial in U.S. District Court in Manhattan (where my good buddy Larry Neumeister will keep an eye on everything).

A lawyer-president would have taken a beating from the extra-chromasome set. But she would have known that we can prove to the world that in America, we rely not on bombs, the U.S. Army or even God to settle our differences. We rely on the laws of men and women. We are now more than seven years out from that cursed day. If we had had treated 9/11 as a crime and not as an act of war, the trials would have been over two years ago, and the bad guys would be facing execution -- they might have even gone ahead of John Muhammad in Virginia last week. We wouldn't be spending any more blood and/or treasure on two wars. And the world would have been grateful to us for behaving like grown-ups.

Now that we're finally gonna put KSM on trial in Manhattan (have fun, Larry!), we're finally getting there. A trial will be a slammin' success, it'll be on TV all day long, and the howlers will be shown to be the fools, knaves and idiots that they are. I find it amazing that these sunshine patriots are convinced that American laws can't deal with criminals.

But then, you can't steal the world's second-largest oil field if you're tied up in court, right?