How Much Dumber Can We Get?

As a nation, I mean.

Today the Attorney General of the United State, Eric Holder, announced that he's going to try five of the 9/11 co-conspirators in New York, just a few tens of miles from where I live.

Excuse me if I don't jump with joy. Like many Americans, I cannot understand someone who wants to treat terror as a kind of crime. It isn't a crime - it's an act of war. Whether it was the first attack on the World Trade Center, the kidnappings in Iran in 1979, or Oklahoma City in 1996 - terror is war.

I realize many people out there think that humanity is mostly good - that people are born sort of OK and are then ruined by society or their environment. And perhaps that is why they view terror in the same category of human offense as DUI, child abuse, and rape. I think this worldview is tragically flawed, but I have neither the eloquence nor the patience to get into it. Suffice to say this kind of thinking is what allowed 9/11 to happen in the first place.

I'm not clairvoyant, but this seems like a bad move on the administration's part. Holder said he would not have made the move if he didn't think he could get successful convictions on all five of the prisoners. Yet I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering how that's going to happen when most of the evidence won't be admissable in court because it was obtained outside the justice system's normal rules.

On a positive note, at least this administration is finally doing something. These guys stopped being useful informants long ago, and the fact that President Bush kept them in a prison, feeding them until they got fat, instead of walking them off a plank is just inexcusable.