The Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Farce

I was going to write more about the ridiculous decision of the Obama administration to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court, but Michael Anton on the Weekly Standard blog made many of my points for me.

the second half of KSM's taunt to his captors is coming true. He is off to New York, where he will have endless opportunities to converse with his many lawyers. They will work hard to ensure that his trial is all about what he "endured" at the hands of the U.S. government, and not at all about what he inflicted on the American people. They will strive to put in the dock George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, George Tenet, John Yoo, the CIA, and the United States government and the American people.

Is there any doubt that the trial will be a festival of Bush Derangement Syndrome and anti-American propaganda? Anton also correctly notes,

our civilian justice system is designed to do specific things, and to try non-citizen enemy combatants who make war on this country and slaughter innocent civilians is not one of them. Now that system will be used for what will likely be a months-long propaganda circus that will make a mockery of our principles and broadcast a message of weakness and pusillanimity to terrorists, their fellow travelers, and intellectual mentors around the world. Even if the U.S. government ends up winning the legal case, we all lose.

But terrorist rights supporters don't care about any of that. They are determined to degrade U.S. constitutional rights by extending them even to hostile alien terrorists. They've long been bleating about the "rule of law" and "due process," as if those concepts had anything to do with alien terrorists who declare war on the U.S. and target our civilians. For much of our history the rule of law would have labeled Mohammed an unlawful combatant, subject to summary execution. And his due process would have been a blindfold and a firing squad, or a drop from the gallows.

I've said it before and I'll repeat it again. The U.S. was fully justified in waterboarding Mohammed. Far more extreme torture would also have been justifiable. He should have received a quick summary execution after we had extracted all available intelligence, which was years ago. The idea that we have to give him the rights of a U.S. citizen, access to lawyers, and a platform to propagandize is just insane.

Terrorist Lawsuit Ruling -- Not Quite as Bad as it Looks

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled that a convicted terrorist could sue John Yoo for coming up with the legal theories that supposedly led to his mistreatment. A first glance this sounds completely insane. Yoo had nothing to do with anyone's treatment. All he did was give a legal opinion. The people responsible for the treatment of prisoners are those who actually carried it out. Yoo gave no orders and had no direct role at all. This judge appears to be either incompetent or acting out of political bias. But it isn't quite as bad as it looks.

The terrorist in question is Jose Padilla, not a alien. Unlike hostile aliens, Padilla has Constitutional rights that were clearly violated by the Bush administration when it declared him an illegal combatant. He probably has a lawsuit against someone, although Yoo isn't the right target. Regardless of the dubious merits of this particular case, there is nothing especially outrageous or unusual about a U.S. citizen filing a frivolous lawsuit, or some judge being stupid enough to pass it through the system. Unfortunately it happens all the time.

Smart Power Sounds Really Dumb

Joseph Nye, of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, has an article in today's LA Times called, "The U.S. can reclaim 'smart power.'" The article of course implies that the U.S. had "smart power," somehow lost it, and needs to get it back. Just what is this fabled smart power? Well, according to Nye

Smart power is the combination of hard and soft power. Soft power is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments.

How's that for clarity? Professor Nye notes that polls show

a serious decline in American attractiveness in Europe, Latin America and, most dramatically, the Muslim world.

As you might expect from anyone who actually takes such polls seriously as a basis for U.S. policy, the article goes downhill from there. Here's one silly statement, a sentiment very popular on the left

over-responding to the provocations of extremists does us more damage than the terrorists ever could.

No, actually it doesn't. Anyone with the slightest idea about how much damage even a small nuclear explosion could inflict on the United States, knows Nye's assertion to be pure nonsense. Yet you will hear this sort of ridiculous claim all the time. Someone with his credentials should know better.

He argues that we need a new foreign policy premise instead of the war on terror. Maybe so, it's not like that's exactly a new idea. The war on terror concept has been criticized from various angles all across the political spectrum. But what is his answer? Wait for it. How about "providing for the global good." Yes, that sounds like a great plan, much more sophisticated than the simplistic war on terror stuff. Terrorism is bound to disappear if we just provide for the global good. Because after all, once terrorists see how much good we are doing, they'll repent of their evil ways and join the world community.

Smart power, for Nye, means

investing in global public goods, providing things people and governments of the world want but have not been able to get

Let's see if I have this straight. If we just stop using the military, and start spending tons of money on "the global public good," people around the world will love us and we'll be a lot more effective at fighting terrorism. If we do this we will be exercising Smart Power. If that's smart power, how about we go with dumb power instead.