COWARDS? NO, THEY'RE WORSE THAN THAT

In response to this ...

The Obama administration, ending a year of indecision with a major reversal, will prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, before a military commission and not a civilian court, as it had once planned.

...John Cole writes:

Nothing else to say but cowards....

And no, I'm not talking about Obama and Holder. I’m talking about the clowns in Congress who apparently don't have enough faith in this nation and who are so afraid of one man that they have to try him in secret in another country.

Most of them know perfectly well that Gitmo could be closed and this and other trials could be conducted the way the Obama administration originally envisioned -- they just know they can proclaim that it's too risky and the public will accept the nonsense.

And one big reason? Not cowardice exactly -- more like false bravado. A big percentage of the country wants to flatter itself by imagining that these guys have superpowers, and the military or the Bush administration or Cheeto-chomping right-wing bloggers are somehow holding these supervillains at bay using superhuman powers of their own. These folks aren't pants-wetters, they're worse: they're people who want to persuade you they're tough by exaggerating the risks they, and they alone, are fending off. (They certainly give no credit to the actual current commander in chief, or anyone in his administration.)

****

And I'd just like to remind you of what Peggy Noonan wrote less than a month ago:

If you asked most Americans why we went into Afghanistan in the weeks after 9/11, they would answer, with perfect common sense, that it was to get the bad guys—to find or kill Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers, to topple the Taliban government that had given them aid and support, to destroy terrorist networks and operations....

America wanted -- needed -- to see U.S. troops pull Osama out of his cave by his beard and drag him in his urine-soaked robes into an American courtroom.

Noonan's a right-wing apparatchik, but she's old-school, so she doesn't always remember what ideas have been disappeared by the right's culture commissars. She still thinks it's the early Bush era, when it was unthinkable that we wouldn't force bin Laden to do a perp walk into a courtroom in Manhattan, assuming we caught him alive. And, as Noonan's slip-up reminds us, that would have been perfectly fine.