Again, I’m not disputing your point. For example, I wish that Sami Al-Arian had got the book thrown at him.

However, I attribute many (not all) of the problems with these prosecutions to the fundamental tension between a terror-prosecution and the nature of our “individual-rights” legal system.

Not that I’d like to dump what we have, but it may be asking too much for any prosecutor, or US President for that matter, to be able to nail these monsters in today’s partisan climate with government-hating, pro-individual rights defense attorneys holding as much power in American courts, as they do today.

We must look at the WoT as something much bigger than some rogue Muslims who want to bomb Americans out of hate. Terrorism is merely a method of operation, a tactic. Terrorism is a part of the overall strategy, just as counterterrorism is a aspect of the overall counterinsurgency. Terrorism is means to an end, defeating it does not defeat the purpose of that terrorism.

It all sounds like an academic war of semantics, sorry. The point is when you only fight terrorism, you are only treating the symptoms and are ignoring the disease.

On military action, of course, I did not mean to imply that it never justified (and I don’t think that could be inferred from my remarks). In fact, my remarks were meant to be favorable to the cruise missile strikes launched by Clinton in Afghanistan (based on the info available at the time, anyway).

But I would set the bar for military opertations higher than this administration has, in part for the reason I articulated above (their political counter-productivity, unless they provide a very high immediate benefit). At a minimum, they should be directed at locations or governments that actually support Islamist terrorist organzations.

In other words, overthrowing the Taliban was a no-brainer. Iraq is another story entirely.

Steven Taylor offers a critical analysis of the Bush administration’s record on terror prosecutions.

The goal of the Islamic extremists (for lack of a better word because Salafists, Wahhabis and Al Qaeda are not broad enough terms) is not simply to separate themselves from mainstream Islam, as the Protestants Reformists did hundreds of years ago, but to reform all of Islam into their own interpretation. The true target of those attacking the U.S. is not Americans, it is the Muslim community.

Predecessors to Bin Laden were not very successful in bringing down non-Islamic governments (such as Egypt and Jordan) because the extremists did not have the support of the Muslim community (Muslims attacking Muslims is never a popular thing). Bin Laden realized that the best way to unite the Muslims of the world to his cause was to find a common enemy, thus, the Evil Westerners. The ill-omened trinity of U.S., Briton and Israel.

Once you understand that, it becomes a little more apparent why we must target these extremists abroad. Simply locking up our borders and playing “prevent defense” is not the right course of action. (how many times have we seen the Cowboys put on the prevent defense and get burned, I think it happened twice in one Monday night game this year).

Playing defense at home will stop most attacks, however, we are treating the symptoms, not the disease. Attacking the cancer where it grows, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and many other countries is where we must be. Not always military of course, this is a political and social fight. Military intervention is just a tool in the tool kit. We do not need overt presence in a country to disrupt the extremists, but we do need to take some form of action to deny sanctuary.

I also think that military actions, such as the action in Afghanistan, are sometimes necessary.

I need to get back to work, so I will leave it at for at least the moment.

On the other hand, intelligence work, including surveilance–with proper checks, of course–can disrupt potential attackers as they enter the USA or after they have arrived. The 9/11 plot could have been unravelled with better information sharing (and probably with more vigilance from the NSC and White House, when “the system was blinking red,” as the 9/11 Commission puts it), and the LAX plot was stopped by an alert border guard at the Washington-BC border. Neither could have been disrupted by “disrupting” the camps and the recruitment centers in Afghanistan, Pakistian, and other countries, because you do not know who the actual attackers are at the stage that they are being recruited and trained.

Naturally, if there are camps in the open somewhere, they can be raided from the air or ground, but as the 9/11 Commisison also notes, it was not practical before 9/11 to do much more than the missile attacks Clinton ordered (because you could not get cooperation regionally for anything more) and after 9/11 it was far, far too late (as Michael Scheurer has noted). In fact, even a year or more before 9/11 it was probably too late for any attacks by US forces in Afghanistan to have stopped the attacks.

Sorry for rambling. I do not know the answer here, but I strongly suspect that it is disruption of those in the “West” (including on our own soil) and at the borders that is most effective, not in foreign countries (if that means outside of Western countries).

As such, who do you think should be held responsible?

Do I think that the President is personally responsible for every error? No, that is obviously ridiculous, but it the overall approach is being directed by appointees of the President. As such, the buck does have to stop, ultimately, with him.