and, why wars don't stop terrorism. why Ashcroft is so wrong, and damaging... as some of us have been saying for well over a year.
slate.msn.com
America was attacked on Sept. 11. But there have been terror attacks on U.S. targets before—al-Qaida attacks that weren't met with a unilateral declaration of war or a rolling out of any Patriot Acts and their creepy DOJ surveillance progeny. There were criminal prosecutions and convictions in the destruction of PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland; the earlier WTC attack in 1993; the 1998 bombings of two U.S. Embassies in East Africa; the (foiled) "Day of Terror" plot (to bomb New York City tunnels, the U.N. building, and the FBI building in New York); and the (foiled) millennium bombing of LAX in 1999. The only difference between these plots and Sept. 11 was that their combined death tolls were in the hundreds, as opposed to the thousands. While that difference in scale is not morally insignificant—not by any means—it is not necessarily legally significant. The difference between a "crime" and a "war" doesn't necessarily come down to integers.
Before we decide that the only way to fight terror is through war, it's worth recalling that the criminal prosecutions for each of the above acts of terror were not only successful; they were also constitutional, frequently transparent, and overwhelmingly legal and fair.
What happened on Sept. 11 to discredit the criminal law system? What failures in this system drove the administration to call immediately for secret roundups of "material witnesses," military tribunals, and secret deportation hearings? Did something go so badly in the first WTC prosecution that led to the decision to detain "enemy combatants" without trial forever? How did we lose faith in a system that worked so well?
Criminal trials are not going to solve every problem facing the nation right now: They cannot stop Iraq from launching weapons of mass destruction, and they would not have removed the Taliban from power. But it doesn't follow that the criminal law cannot bring terrorists to justice, nor does it follow that we need to gut the existing system—replacing openness with secrecy, and due process with parodies of process—to do so. |
