To the Editor:
I look forward to discussing with my friend, David Kolodin, the disastrous ways that our country reacted to the criminal hijacking and crashing of four planes on Sept. 11, 2001. Instead of correctly treating the acts as an audacious and murderous criminal conspiracy, the U.S. mistakenly treated it as an act of war, and used the crimes as excuses to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. There was no proof, to my knowledge, that either country had any role in planning the 9/11 attacks.
Whatever the U.S. response to those attacks, it was wrong for the President of the United States to order the recent assassination of an American citizen in Yemen, without any apparent attempt to capture him and bring him to justice. To my knowledge, there was no attempt to capture Osama bin Laden, either, but there should have been.
What better way to expose the moral bankruptcy of the criminal organization, Al Qaeda, than to try both men in U.S. Federal Courts or at the International Criminal Court, if only the U.S. still supported that noble institution, as it surely will, someday.
Regarding the revocation of habeas corpus, the 9/11 attacks were not an “invasion” as the term is used in the U.S. Constitution, and there is no cause to revoke the right to trial by jury to any alleged criminal. David cited Lincoln’s revocation of habeas corpus during the Civil War, which the Constitution did authorize, as the South was certainly in “rebellion,” but that doesn’t make it right.
Great men don’t always make correct decisions, as FDR’s detention camps for Japanese-Americans sadly illustrated.
The way to keep American military men and women out of harm’s way, which David cited as a goal, is not to send them to other countries to wage war against people who pose no threat to the U.S. Instead, we should mobilize the police forces of the world to arrest alleged international criminals and bring them to speedy trials, as the Constitution requires.
Morrison Bonpasse
Newcastle
