The current handling of the accused in the attempted airline bombing is turning out to be an interesting test case for how the Obama administration will deal with terrorist suspects, and for how the GOP will respond.
The Brits are a prime example of the success of what is regarded by most of the world as the proper pursuit of justice, with their stiff upper lip, just "carry on" approach of not becoming Chicken Little, and their trying of suspects in court for their crimes. And they dealt with many years of IRA bombings, in which the enemy always looked just like the victims, a more intractable problem in many ways. They were, in short, not terrorised by terrorism, which renders it far less useful.
It's therefore all the more maddening to see the currents of thought that get stirred up when terrorism threatens to visit our shores. On the one hand, we pursue laughable security measures which might be effective only if someone attempted the exact same thing again–stopping everyone from leaving their seats during the last hour of flight, for instance, isn't precisely a tough measure for a would-be bomber to get around. Then the spokesmen for the new strain of "conservative" thought call for declaring terrorism an act of war, invoking miltary tribunals, etc., abandoning the court system we devised to handle all criminal acts in order to lessen or even abandon the need for evidence. The argument often appears to be that we somehow just know who's guilty, even without finding out if they really are–the very kind of thinking our Constitution is supposed to safeguard against.
Back when the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, attempted something very similar when Bush was in office, we tried him in the usual fashion, convicted him and sentenced him to life without parole. We didn't reward him by losing our minds in fear, which is after all the goal of terrorists. Obama appears poised to deal with the latest foiled bomber in exactly the same way Bush dealt with Reid. It was a rare, nearly singular instance of Bush doing precisely the right thing, even though a month earlier he had given the go-ahead for military tribunals and could have handled it that way.
Should it surprise anyone that certain folks are surfacing to say that what Bush did was fine, but that Obama has basically surrendered to terrorists by planning to do the exact same thing? It's as if they have forgotten everything that happened more than a week back, and believe the same is true of everyone else. Who knows–maybe Dick Cheney really can't remember that far back.
Extra points to Cheney for bringing up a monster of a Straw Man, too: "But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren't, it makes us less safe. Why doesn't he want to admit we're at war?"
Cheney really is an android, and when he pretends he isn't, we get lulled into thinking we won't have to put up with his diatribes for another century. Why doesn't Dick Cheney want to admit he's an android?
