Dean's World

The London Bombing has struck a nerve. Some liberals are losing their capacity for tolerance.

The liberal NJ Star Ledger published this article, To Catch a Terrorist by John Farmer Jr.

Whatever comes of the British investigation into the London subway bombings, it will also share this tragic feature of America's 9/11 experience: The resolution will come too late. Britain may well find, arrest and convict accomplices to the bombings, and may even identify, prosecute and convict a "mastermind," sentencing them to the harshest penalty available in England: life imprisonment.

So what?

The London bombings have exposed once again what a hollow remedy criminal prosecution is for terrorism...

Finally, as a practical matter, treating captured al Qaeda members in accordance with the law of war — in which the only information they could be required to give would be name, rank and serial number — would frustrate any efforts to gather intelligence in order to prevent future attacks.

What, then, is to be done?

What we have here, I believe, is a failure of imagination. The threat we face is sort of like a crime, and sort of like a war, but isn't really like either. It's new.

The ever-tolerant Jersey Journal published Necessary to go on the offensive against terror by John Yoo:

The bombings in London demonstrate the perils of playing defense, rather than offense, in the war on terrorism. Yet almost four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, many of our political leaders have become complacent. Prominent Democrats, such as Jimmy Carter and once-again presidential candidate Joe Biden, demand the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, but they have no idea where the al-Qaida prisoners should go. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin compares American guards there to Nazis or Soviets and wants terrorists treated as civilians, not enemy combatants...

..Renewing the Patriot Act and staying the course at Guantanamo Bay remain important tools for gaining the intelligence that can prevent another Sept. 11. But we should realize that these measures remain fundamentally defensive. In order to prevail, we must develop an offensive strategy that focuses less on controlling territory or cities, none of which al-Qaida possesses, and more on new ways to disrupt and destroy networks.

As Samuel Johnson said, "when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." Many Jerseyans rely on public transportation. When a man suspects that the train he takes to work may be bombed by a cult-programmed 'militant', concern about root causes goes out the window.

Even before the attacks, the New York Times suggested that we read this article Are Terrorists Piratical?

This was codified explicitly in the 1856 Declaration of Paris, and it has been reiterated as a guiding principle of piracy law ever since. Pirates no longer terrorize the seas because a concerted effort among the European states in the 19th century almost eradicated them.

It is just such a concerted effort that all states must now undertake against terrorists, until the crime of terrorism becomes as remote and obsolete as piracy.

For once, the Times was right. Douglas Burgess' article is worth reading.

Burgess says:

What is needed now is a framework for an international crime of terrorism. The framework should be incorporated into the U.N. Convention on Terrorism and should call for including the crime in domestic criminal law and perhaps the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. This framework must recognize the unique threat that terrorists pose to nation-states, yet not grant them the legitimacy accorded to belligerent states. It must provide the foundation for a law that criminalizes not only terrorist acts but membership in a terrorist organization. It must define methods of punishment...

Coming up with such a framework would perhaps seem impossible, except that one already exists. Dusty and anachronistic, perhaps, but viable all the same. More than 2,000 years ago, Marcus Tullius Cicero defined pirates in Roman law as hostis humani generis, "enemies of the human race." From that day until now, pirates have held a unique status in the law as international criminals subject to universal jurisdiction—meaning that they may be captured wherever they are found, by any person who finds them. The ongoing war against pirates is the only known example of state vs. nonstate conflict until the advent of the war on terror, and its history is long and notable. More important, there are enormous potential benefits of applying this legal definition to contemporary terrorism.

In Britain, some are making mob style threats against the British public. They're not hard to find.

..TO UNDERSTAND THE POTENTIAL OF DEFINING TERRORISM as a species of piracy, consider the words of the 16th-century jurist Alberico Gentili's De jure belli: "Pirates are common enemies, and they are attacked with impunity by all, because they are without the pale of the law. They are scorners of the law of nations; hence they find no protection in that law." Gentili, and many people who came after him, recognized piracy as a threat, not merely to the state but to the idea of statehood itself. All states were equally obligated to stamp out this menace, whether or not they had been a victim of piracy.

But before conservatives disagree with the plan on that basis, it would help to ask - how effective have we been at fighting terrorism? As President Bush said of the Iraq war:

The lesson of this experience is clear: The terrorists can kill the innocent, but they cannot stop the advance of freedom.

We keep saying that we should improve our intelligence gathering capacities, but the FBI and the CIA are showing few signs of progress. Many Iraqis are deciding that if they want something done right, if they want to protect their families and their communities, they're going to have to do it themselves. Who can blame them?

Terrorism destroys trust within communities and it destroys trust in the government. The nihilistic targeting of random civilians is recognized as an abhorrence in nearly every society, because it inevitably destroys those societies. Allowing it to thrive is not only a form of societal suicide, it's also an abhorrence.

Fighting terrorism, like fighting piracy, preserves societies.

...there are immediate benefits to pointing out that terrorism has a precedent in piracy. In the short term, it is a tool to cut the Gordian knot of definition that has hampered antiterrorist legislation for 40 years. In the long term, and far more important, it provides the parameters by which to understand this current and intense conflict and the means within which it may one day be resolved. That resolution will begin with the recognition among nations that terrorism is a threat to all states and to all persons, the same recognition given to piracy in 1856. Terrorists, like pirates, must be given their proper status in law: hostis humani generis, enemies of the human race.

Piracy laws have been proven to work. On a purely pragmatic basis Burgess offers an excellent solution to a difficult problem.

On the basis of human empathy for the victims and potential victims of terrorism. it's the best solution out there.