Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Civilian Trials of 9/11 Terrorists

I was hoping that someone else would make a good, cogent argument defending the decision to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in New York in a civilian trial, so that I would not have to do so.  And someone has.

The whole idea that we should not treat terrorism as a law enforcement problem is backwards.  Make these guys criminals and not politicians/leaders/martyrs.  Successful law enforcement is something that reinforces the legitimacy of government and especially of democratic ones.  Time to trot out the rule of law and show these @#$@#$ what we are made of.  While eight years ago I wanted to put all of those responsible for 9/11 on a plane and have it crash, time and distance and the egregious errors of the Bush administration make it clear that a NY jury and judge should put these guys in the appropriate place--a high security prison somewhere in the US and perhaps on death row (a debate for another time).

2 comments:

Steve Greene said...

Amen, brother. Also, I'll not take it personally that you never comment on my blog.

Steve Saideman said...

That is because I thought you had blocked the comments, but perhaps that was another blog. Yours, of course, is http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/roller/shgreene/