In my initial posting on the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Trial, I asserted that “there’s an incredibly good chance that Mohammed and his comrades will go free.  The fact that KSM was repeatedly waterboarded would seem to taint any subsequent evidence, including his own confession.”

This was based on the presumption that the whole point of trying KSM in a civilian court was to demonstrate that we’ve changed our evil ways and would allow accused terrorists to avail themselves of the finest justice system in the world.

Not so much, it seems.   Jim Geraghty:

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa: “I don’t think you can say that failure to convict is not an option, when we have juries in this country.”

Attorney General Eric Holder: I have thought about that possibility. Congress has passed legislation that would not allow the release of these individuals in this country. If there is not a successful conclusion to this trial, that would not mean that this person would be released into this country…

Grassley: My understanding is that if for some reason he’s not convicted, or a judge lets him off on a technicality, he’ll be an enemy combatant, so you’re right back where you started.

I can’t find the full transcript online elsewhere, so don’t have Holder’s retort.   But if the defendants have zero chance of being released, this is a show trial and a sham.   That’s frankly much worse than the status quo, much less a military tribunal.

Marc Ambinder finds a hidden news story in this WaPo report by Perry Bacon:

Administration officials say they expect that as many as 40 of the 215 detainees at Guantanamo will be tried in federal court or military commissions. About 90 others have been cleared for repatriation or resettlement in a third country, and about 75 more have been deemed too dangerous to release but cannot be prosecuted because of evidentiary issues and limits on the use of classified material.

He correctly notes that, while Bacon’s piece focuses on the shifting mood of the Senate, the real story is that 75 of 215 Gitmo detainees — that is, more than a third of them — have been deemed “Fifth Category” types who will get neither a hearing nor a release.

This is remarkable, indeed, given the Obama administration’s public position on Gitmo.  Obama made it a point to order Guantanamo closed on his first full day in office and campaigned strongly against it.  But, once elected, he moderated his policy.

The reality is that we have these people locked up and have no  good options as to what to do with them. In many cases, they can’t be expatriated.  In others, there’s either not enough evidence to prove them “guilty” beyond reasonable doubt or said evidence is tainted by treatment deemed appropriate for foreign terrorist suspects but not innocent-until-proven-guilty criminal defendants.  Releasing them into American cities would not only be dangerous but political suicide.

So moving them to a Gitmo in all but name is the least bad option.

via Spencer Ackerman

From left: Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, Waleed bin Attash, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi and Ramzi Binalshibh. (AP)

Responding to Attorney General Eric Holder’s explanation that Khalid Sheik Mohammed is being tried in civilian courts because the 9/11 victims were mostly civilians and because the attacks took place on U.S. soil whereas his compatriots who attacked the U.S.S. Cole would be tried before military tribunals since the attack was on a military target, Tom Maguire quips “[I]f the next batch of terrorists are clever enough to attack an elementary school will they be tried in juvenile court?”

More seriously, he points us to Pat Buchanan’s column asking “Are We at War — Or Not?”

Is it possible we have done an injustice to this man by keeping him locked up all these years without trial? For that is what this trial implies — that he may not be guilty.

And if we must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that KSM was complicit in mass murder, by what right do we send Predators and Special Forces to kill his al-Qaida comrades wherever we find them? For none of them has been granted a fair trial.

When the Justice Department sets up a task force to wage war on a crime organization like the Mafia or MS-13, no U.S. official has a right to shoot Mafia or gang members on sight. No one has a right to bomb their homes. No one has a right to regard the possible death of their wives and children in an attack as acceptable collateral damage.

Yet that is what we do to al-Qaida, to which KSM belongs.

We conduct those strikes in good conscience because we believe we are at war. But if we are at war, what is KSM doing in a U.S. court?

Buchanan goes on to give several historical examples, some more salient than others.  But his overall point about the dichotomy over how we’re dealing with terrorists vice how we deal with criminals is apt.  He continues:

Were not KSM’s Miranda rights impinged when he was not only not told he could have a lawyer on capture, but that his family would be killed and he would be water-boarded if he refused to talk?

And if all the evidence against the five defendants comes from other than their own testimony under duress, do not their lawyers have a right to know when, where, how and from whom Justice got the evidence to prosecute them? Does KSM have the right to confront all witnesses against him, even if they are al-Qaida turncoats or U.S. spies still transmitting information to U.S. intelligence?

I am not a lawyer but there are ways around some of these issues.  But, for the most part, the Justice Department will be very constrained in what evidence it can present given the need to protect sources and methods.

UPDATE:  CIPA link via Adam Serwer.   Note, too, that my concern isn’t that classified information will go unprotected but that the need to protect classified information will hamstring the prosecution.  Given that we have other, legally sanctioned options, having a civilian show trial strikes me as imprudent.

Nidal Malik Hasan is a Muslim who killed 14 people. Does that make him a terrorist? Some think so.

Sen. Joe Lieberman called the Fort Hood massacre an act of “Islamist extremism” – even as top Army brass warned Sunday against guessing at a motive, fearing backlash against Muslim soldiers. “There are very, very strong warning signs here that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act,” Lieberman (I-Conn) told Fox News on Sunday.  “If the reports that we’re receiving of various statements he made, acts he took are valid, he had turned to Islamist extremism.”

Lieberman, the former Democratic vice presidential candidate, chairs the Senate Homeland Security committee.

Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people and wounding 30 more on Thursday, reportedly expressed moral concerns about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lieberman’s comments were in stark contrast to U.S. Army chief of staff George Casey, who told CNN he’s deeply worried “that the speculation could cause something that we don’t want to see happen.” “It would be a shame – as great a tragedy as this was – it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well,” Casey said.

The fact that outrage over Hasan’s villainy could spark a backlash against innocents has no bearing on this question.  It’s a separate issue entirely.

Whether Hasan is a “terrorist” depends entirely on his motivation.   To qualify as “terrorism,” the act has to be committed to instill fear for the purpose of achieving political goals.   If he’s just an angry Muslim who went nuts and started shooting people, he’s a psychopath and a killer but not a terrorist.  Even if he was trying to send an “I’ll show them” message, he’s no more a terrorist than the Columbine killers, the lunatic who shot up Virginia Tech, or one of those postal workers who go on a rampage.

Now, evidence is still pouring in. Hasan reportedly “once gave a lecture to other doctors in which he said non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats” and actually “was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda.” That, combined with various Internet postings and other rants, at very least makes him a terrorist sympathizer.  And Jim Lindgren sees some matchup of Hasan with the typical psychology of a terrorist.

But even if Hasan was an al Qaeda wannabe who was trying to restore the Caliphate with his evil deeds, I’m not sure that he’s a “terrorist” in any sense that really matters.  If he’s just a lone fanatic rather than part of an organized group, the difference between him and any other mass murderer is academic.  Indeed, Charles Manson was politically motivated and actually had a group of followers but he’s never referred to as a “terrorist.”

UPDATE:  Some commenters are apparently under the impression that, unless we call Hasan a “terrorist,” we’re somehow excusing his crimes.  My argument is not that he’s merely some poor soul who needs help and deserves our compassion.  Or that there’s no such thing as Islamist terrorism.

Rather clearly, Hasan willfully committed criminal acts that were at least partly motivated by radical Islamist ideology.  I simply think “terrorism” is more than that.

UPDATE II:  A commenter points to the case of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, who was almost universally judged a terrorist, a label with which I would concur.  Like Hasan, McVeigh was ideologically motivated.  So, what’s the difference?  Aside from the fact that McVeigh formed a criminal conspiracy with a likeminded group and carefully plotted his attack for months, he was clearly trying to send a political message to his government.   It’s not clear what Hasan’s intent was at this juncture.

Ariana Huffington has generated quite a bit of buzz for her unlikely-to-be-taken suggestion that Vice President Biden resign in protest if President Obama sends more troops to Afghanistan.   The cuteness of the suggestion has unfortunately overshadowed the opening paragraph in Holly Bailey and Evan Thomas’ Newsweek piece on “A Day in the Life of Joe Biden” (HTML title: “Joe Biden, White House Truth Teller”):

Joe Biden had a question. During a long Sunday meeting with President Obama and top national-security advisers on Sept. 13, the VP interjected, “Can I just clarify a factual point? How much will we spend this year on Afghanistan?” Someone provided the figure: $65 billion. “And how much will we spend on Pakistan?” Another figure was supplied: $2.25 billion. “Well, by my calculations that’s a 30-to-1 ratio in favor of Afghanistan. So I have a question. Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we’re spending in Pakistan, we’re spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?” The White House Situation Room fell silent. But the questions had their desired effect: those gathered began putting more thought into Pakistan as the key theater in the region.

As I explain in my New Atlanticist essay “Strategic Balance in AfPak,” Biden’s got a point.

AP Photo

Matthew Yglesias suggests that one thing that could aid the fight in Afghanistan would be to lower tariffs against Afghan goods and motivate our allies to do the same.

If I’m reading these slides right then textile products made in Afghanistan are not eligible for duty-free sale in the United States. Changing that rule might encourage some factory-building in Afghanistan. Similarly we see here that some of Afghanistan’s key trade partners have very high tariffs on Afghan agricultural products. Perhaps we could persuade Turkey and India that they don’t need to be charging 50+% taxes on imports of Afghan grapes. India is Afghanistan’s largest export market right now despite those high taxes; changing it would open some additional economic opportunities for people.

One of his commenters adds that the United States could probably benefit from lowering tariffs on textiles from Pakistan, as well (which are ridiculously high). I agree with this sentiment and I think that there is a lot of benefit from dropping our short-sighted agricultural tariffs and agricultural subsidies. The benefits would just be economic–they’d improve relations and security, too.

Obama administration officials are now admitting what has been apparent for weeks: that they are giving serious consideration to radically downsizing the Afghanistan mission.  Peter Baker and Elisabeth Bumiller break the story in this morning’s NYT, noting that a combination of factors have President Obama strongly reconsidering the Biden Plan, which he rejected as recently as March, which calls for a narrow counter-terrorism strategy combined with accelerated handoff to Afghan security forces.

I assess this at some length in my New Atlanticist piece, “Obama Having Buyer’s Remorse in Afghanistan?”

Given that I both anticipated this policy change and that it largely accords with my own instincts on the matter, I’m inclined to give Obama a great deal of slack here.

While I agree with CNAS scholar Andrew Exum that me must consider the costs of withdrawing from Afghanistan along with the advantages and that there are indeed American interests that merit risking American lives in that theater, I also agree with Dr. Henry Kissinger that we must consider our capacity and staying power as well as our desires when deciding what to do next.  Given that the American public will not put up with heavy casualties in Afghanistan for decades on end, especially given a corrupt host government and the lack of progress in building infrastructure or training Afghan security forces, it’s incumbent upon the president to steer the course of our policy accordingly.

Much more at the link.  I’ll also be discussing this tonight on OTB Radio with Dave Schuler and special guest Joshua Foust of Registan.net.

Photo: Getty Images.

Wired reports that studies show that “enhanced interrogation”, far from being a reliable source of information, can actually make someone less of an intelligence asset because the stress involved changes the biochemistry of the brain:

“There is a vast literature on the effects of extreme stress on motivation, mood and memory, using both animals and humans,” writes Shane O’Mara, a stress researcher at Ireland’s Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience. “These techniques cause severe, repeated and prolonged stress, which compromises brain tissue supporting memory and executive function.”

[...]

A report published by the Intelligence Science Board in 2007 found that no research existed to support the use of enhanced interrogation. And O’Mara’s review, published Monday in Trends in Cognitive Science, describes a wealth of science that supports ending the practice.

O’Mara derides the belief that extreme stress produces reliable memory as “folk neurobiology” that “is utterly unsupported by scientific evidence.” The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex — the brain’s centers of memory processing, storage and retrieval — are profoundly altered by stress hormones. Keep the stress up long enough, and it will “result in compromised cognitive function and even tissue loss,” warping the minds that interrogators want to read.

What’s more, tortured suspects might not even realize when they’re lying. Frontal lobe damage can produce false memories: As torture is maintained for weeks or months or years, suspects may incorporate their captors’ allegations into their own version of reality.

What’s frustrating about the torture debate to me is that all of the professionals who are experts in the field are routinely ignored by the pro-”enhanced interrogation” side of the debate. Just so we’re clear, in addition to the biochemical evidence above, here’s a few posts and articles that we’ve seen over the past few months:

• We’ve seen that an Air Force officer with counterterrorism experience and experience interrogating al-Qaeda members opposes enhanced interrogation on the grounds that it doesn’t gather effective intelligence.

• We’ve had military psychologists who work on the SERE program, which trains soldiers to resist “enhanced interrogation,” claim that the use of same on detainees to be counterproductive.

• We’ve seen an FBI counterintelligence agent who specialize in counterterrorism and also had experience interrogating al-Qaeda members find no evidence of the effectiveness of “enhanced interrogation.”

• We’ve seen another FBI counterintelligence agent explain that the use of “enhanced interrogation” makes it much harder to recruit reliable intelligence assets.

• We’ve seen a Marine Corps interrogator point out the uselessness of such techniques even if there’s a “ticking time bomb” scenario.

Against this, we mostly have the claims of Dick Cheney who says that the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report demonstrates that the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” enabled the United States to gain significant amounts of intelligence, particularly from the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed. The problem is, of course, is that this claim doesn’t survive scrutiny. Most of Cheney’s claims involve intelligence that was already known prior to KSMs capture, or organizational information that was obtained from KSM’s computer and paper files–not his actual interrogation. Indeed, most of what KSM said under “enhanced interrogation” was useless. It wasn’t until it stopped and the traditional American methods of interrogation employed instead that he actually provided anything of value.

The pro-”enhanced interrogation” side of the house loves to throw out hypotheticals and vague claims that these techniques are valuable, but the evidence doesn’t bear this claim out. These techniques do not provide any signficant or usable intelligence; they make useless people who might be turned into valuable intelligence assets, as noted above; they provide a powerful rallying cry for the recruitment of people into our enemies’ cause; they make it less likely that our enemies will surrender to our troops, which exposes them to unnecessary risk of harm; they make it more likely that our soldiers, when captured, will be tortured; they make it harder to recruit counterintelligence assets; they force us to waste time and resources in following false leads and finally, they undermine the moral authority of the United States.

What’s the upside?

(cross-posted to Heretical Ideas)

Today, as you’ve doubtless realized, is the 8th anniversary of the al Qaeda attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and the thwarted attack on a destination we’ll likely never know.  It is, for those of us too young to recall the JFK assassination or Pearl Harbor, the most significant public event of our lifetimes.  We’ll all remember “where we were when.”

At what point, I wonder, do we stop commemorating the anniversary, especially those that aren’t multiples of ten or twenty-five?

Obviously, we do Independence Day every July 4th. But that’s about it. Pearl Harbor usually gets a mention but we don’t do much about it anymore.  Most Americans couldn’t tell you when VE or VJ Day are; many couldn’t tell you what they are.  Few now remember the Maine or the Alamo.   Armistice Day has long since given way to Veterans Day, which itself has long since mostly been just another Monday holiday.

We’ll obviously make a big to-do about the 10th anniversary of 9/11 come 2011.  Will we do so with the 11th?  12th?  13th?  At some point, this day will be just another day for those not personally affected.

Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent and an expert on al-Qaeda operations who has interrogated al-Qaeda members reviews the claims that the Bush Administration’s torture techniques were effective and finds them wanting:

The inspector general’s report distinguishes between intelligence gained from regular interrogation and from the harsher methods, which culminate in waterboarding. While the former produces useful intelligence, according to the report, the latter “is a more subjective process and not without concern.” And the information in the two memos reinforces this differentiation.

They show that substantial intelligence was gained from pocket litter (materials found on detainees when they were captured), from playing detainees against one another and from detainees freely giving up information that they assumed their questioners already knew. A computer seized in March 2003 from a Qaeda operative for example, listed names of Qaeda members and money they were to receive.

[...]

Supporters of the enhanced interrogation techniques have jumped from claim to claim about their usefulness. They have asserted, for example, that harsh treatment led Mr. Mohammed to reveal the plot to attack the Library Tower in Los Angeles. But that plot was thwarted in 2002, and Mr. Mohammed was not arrested until 2003. Recently, interviews with unnamed sources led The Washington Post to report that harsh techniques turned Mr. Mohammed into an intelligence “asset.”

This latest claim will come as news to Mr. Mohammed’s prosecutors, to his fellow detainees (whom he instructed, at his arraignment, not to cooperate with the United States) and indeed to Mr. Mohammed himself. He told the International Committee of the Red Cross that “I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear.”

Read the whole thing, which demonstrates quite effectively that the torture techniques employed by the CIA did not provide us with information about al-Qaeda operations. They did not enable us to stop any terror threats. They were counterproductive and not worth the costs.

As Adam Sewer rightly points out,

We’re not seeing too many “professionals” argue the case for torture–instead we see those who believe fighting terrorists is about some kind of contest of will between Islam and the West romanticizing criminal behavior as “necessary” because, for some reason, they think protecting American society requires that take our cues from those we’re fighting.

This is very much the case. Time and time again, people with actual experience with interrogating terror suspects and actual experience and knowledge about the effectiveness of torture techniques have come out to explain that they are ineffective and that their use threatens national security more than it helps.

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Thomas Paine all supported the fair and decent treatment of even our enemies. Both the Redcoats and Hessian mercenaries were treated with decency and respect. Our Founding Fathers did this even though more American soldiers died as prisoners than died on the field of battle. They knew that American ideals meant something, and that fair and decent treatment was not only the right thing to do but the practical thing to do (many Hessian mercenaries stayed here and became loyal American citizens, for instance). Surely we can learn something from the wisdom of our Founding Fathers.

(link via Jim Henley)

Via Patrick Appel, former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa explains how the use of torture can undermine the United States’ ability to both obtain information and recruit double agents.

A second and arguably more important goal of the FBI is to persuade some of these people, or “targets,” to change sides and share the information they have about their own governments and countries with us. It’s the real-life James Bond scenario: developing “double agents” and obtaining critical foreign intelligence in the interest of national security. The FBI uses the fact that it operates on American soil to its advantage. FBI agents, unlike their CIA counterparts, can operate openly, rather than covertly. FBI agents also do not have to worry about hostile host governments discovering their activities and disrupting their intelligence networks. This means that the FBI is in a relatively strong position to produce a steady stream of valuable intelligence that is difficult to obtain abroad.

[...]

But getting people to flip is primarily a psychological game rather than a material one. After all, the FBI is asking its targets to commit the ultimate act of disloyalty to their country—treason. Few people are willing to make this leap quickly, even in exchange for the most lucrative or attractive offer. It’s an FBI agent’s job to slowly win the target’s trust and help him rationalize his decision to switch his allegiance. In my experience as a former FBI agent who both participated in and observed successful recruitments, it’s much easier to do this when a target has, at some level, a sense of admiration and respect for the United States. A nugget of goodwill toward America offers an agent the chance to step in, gain the target’s confidence, and convince him that playing for Team USA is worth the risk.

Policies like the use of torture make it more difficult for the FBI to develop relationships based on trust. Even when torture is used on a few people and in another country, and by a different agency, it casts doubts on the U.S. government’s overall willingness to act in good faith. Targets often project the skepticism about the United States that torture fosters onto individual FBI agents, who are often the only face of the government they see. In short, torture is fundamentally at odds with the image of the United States as a country that will play by the rules, and that is how the FBI must be perceived in order to do its job.

Considering that we’ve obtained virtually no useful evidence from the use of torture, even against high value targets like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the security/morality tradeoff here doesn’t even exist: On both moral and utilitarian calculations, there’s simply no justification for the use of torture.

Chris Battle is surprised how often he hears the question “How many terrorists has the Department of Homeland Security caught?” He argues that DHS’ job is prevention, not apprehension; that’s what the FBI does.

The implication of the question – usually the questioner already knows the answer – is that the failure to catch members of al Qaeda during the fingerprinting processes at the border, or during Border Patrol operations along the southwest land border, or during the student visa process, or during the airport screening process … the implication is that the tactics implemented by DHS are obviously failing. No terrorists.

It is important to remember, however, that we usually won’t know if the efforts are successful – at least from the perspective of stopping the next al Qaeda operative. It should be remembered that most of the September 11th terrorists who entered the United States did so by exploiting our immigration system. For example, Hani Hanjour, one of the men who helped crash a 757 into the Pentagon, entered America allegedly as a foreign student. He applied for and received his student visa, but he never set foot on the school at which he was supposedly studying. In fact, nobody ever heard from him again until that fateful morning of September 11, 2001.

Had the DHS student visa program been in place at the time, Hanjour’s failure to show up at the school for which he was given a visa would have resulted in an alert being issued to US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. ICE would have then investigated the matter. Had they run down Hanjour, he would have been deported.

And he would never have been tagged as a “terrorist.” He would only have been an individual who was caught exploiting the immigration system – like millions of others who do the same.

So, yes, it’s true that few terrorists are “caught” by DHS. It’s also true that few terrorists who are caught will likely ever be known.

That’s fair enough, I think, if the question is being asked as a proxy for “Is DHS doing its job?”

When I ask it, though, I do so as a proxy for “Is this worth the sacrifice in liberty for ordinary Americans?” Chris is right that we’ll never know, for example, how many would-be airline hijackers have been thwarted by the more stringent airport screening procedures implemented after 9/11.  We do know, however, that something like 75 million Americans fly each year and that each and every one of them is inconvenienced.  That tens of millions of man-hours a year are thereby wasted getting to the airport much earlier than would otherwise be required.  That Americans are so frustrated with the new rules that they’ve skipped some 41 million trips that they would otherwise have taken.

Oh, and all of the 9/11 hijackers could have passed through the current screening procedures, albeit possibly not with box cutters.   But there are other weapons that would easily pass through – especially if one includes weapons that could be easily assembled aboard the plane.

None of that matters, though, because of two unarguably useful post-9/11 changes. First, we’ve hardened the cockpit doors and implemented procedures to ensure that they’re not opened — no matter what — in the even of a takeover attempt.  Second, passengers have learned to go Flight 93 on would-be terrorists.  Before 9/11, passengers reasonably assumed that hijackers just wanted to go to Cuba or get paid a ransom or whatever and that the passengers would likely be released unharmed afterward.  Now, as Richard Reid’s almost comical attempt to blow up a plane with a shoe bomb demonstrated, passengers will overwhelm a would-be attacker.

That hasn’t stopped the TSA from making everyone take their shoes off to get through security screening, of course.

As has been anticipated, the man who murdered 270 people by bombing Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, has been given a compassionate release from prison so that he may spend his dying days with his family.

Abdel Basset al-Megrahi (L) walks up the stairs to a waiting jet at Glasgow airport August 20, 2009. The Scottish government decided on Thursday to free Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi from prison on compassionate grounds as he is suffering from advanced prostate cancer and he will return home to Libya. Megrahi was sentenced to 27 years in prison in 2001 for his part in blowing up New York-bound Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988, killing 259 people on board and 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland. REUTERS/David Moir (BRITAIN CRIME LAW POLITICS IMAGES OF THE DAY)

I’ve written a lengthy roundup of the matter, “Lockerbie Bomber Released Over U.S. Objections,” for New Atlanticist.

Alex Massie argues that there’s nothing gained by keeping Abdelbaset al-Megrahi locked up, especially since we’re pretty sure he didn’t act alone.

Perhaps. Then again, he is the only person to actually be convicted in the mass murder of these 270 people. Surely, his part in that merits spending more than eight years in prison.

The decision, of course, is rightly with the UK Scots.  They, not the United States, have the jurisdiction here and, while our government has every right to express its wishes, they have the right to carry out the policy they think best.  Certainly, al-Megrahi would have been allowed to rot in prison were he in American custody; indeed, he may well have been executed for his crimes.  Despite our common law origins, there is quite a bit of divergence in the criminal justice cultures of the two countries and, indeed, within the Western democracies generally.

Also, is it just me or is it rather surreal that he’s flying home on a commercial airliner (not Pan American, which ceased operations long before al-Megrahi ever went to trial) and climbing stairs saying “Next time …Relax before you fly”?

UPDATE: Joe Gandelman has a nice roundup as well.

UPDATE II: I have corrected the above to note that the sovereignty here is with the Scots, not the UK central government.  Interestingly, all of the papers cited in the piece — mostly British but also the American Christian Science Monitor — treat the subject otherwise, writing about it in terms of US-UK relations and US-UK cultural disparity.

Photo: Reuters Pictures.

The Department of Homeland Security is removing the words “United States” from a New York border station for fear that it will make the station a terrorist target.

Four years ago, when the federal General Services Administration unveiled its plans for a new border-crossing station here in northeastern New York State, the design was presented as part of the agency’s campaign to raise the dismal standards of government architecture. Even many in the famously fractious architectural community celebrated the complex — particularly its main building, emblazoned with glossy yellow, 21-foot-high letters spelling “United States” — as a rare project the government could point to with pride.

[...]

Yet three weeks ago, less than a month after the station opened, workers began prying the big yellow letters off the building’s facade on orders from Customs and Border Protection. The plan is to dismantle the rest of the sign this week.

“At the end of the day, I think they were somewhat surprised at how bold and how bright it was,” said Les Shepherd, the chief architect of the General Services Administration, referring to the customs agency’s sudden turnaround.

“There were security concerns,” said Kelly Ivahnenko, a spokeswoman for the customs agency. “The sign could be a huge target and attract undue attention. Anything that would place our officers at risk we need to avoid.”

As you can see from the photo of the station in question above, it’s clear that once the word “United States” is removed, no terrorist worth his salt will be able to tell that this building is, in fact, a border crossing station…

(link via Cory Doctorow)

Photo Courtesy the New York Times

Imperial Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes author Michael Scheuer, a former senior CIA official, tells Glenn Beck that the America’s only hope is for Osama bin Laden to detonate “a major weapon” here to get a “grass roots movement” going.

Words fail me.