THE BEST ARGUMENTS ARE FACTUAL – AT 10:57 A.M. ET:  Former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino knocks down some of the myths surrounding terrorist trials in the United States. 

It's nice to see the use of facts, for a change.  From The Politico:

...we've heard three people in the Sunday shows talking about the "hundreds" of terrorists that we have tried in US courts and hold in US prisons - as if KSM (the mastermind of 9-11) was just some regular Joe terrorist. Some facts:

First, the only civilian trial of a 9/11 terrorist was Zacarias Moussaoui, who was arrested before 9/11 had even happened and before the president had authorized detaining terrorists as enemy combatants.

Second, Moussaoui had his trial while the entire military commission system was under sustained legal attack by left-wing lawyers, which put all military commission trials on hold. So he couldn't have been tried by a military commission back then anyway.

Third, the trial was a circus largely because the defendant was uncontrollable and used the attention to spout hate against the US; the prosecutors were unfairly accused of misconduct, though the judge gave some credence to the accusations; and they couldn't even get the death penalty even though Moussaoui eventually admitted he was supposed to be the 20th hijacker. The Moussaoui trial is hardly viewed as a model of success.

And...

As for the "hundreds of terrorists" – that figure encompasses every type of terrorism charge DOJ brought in eight years and has nothing to do with 9/11, nor were any of those people foreign terrorists captured overseas as part of the war on terror. Those terrorists were held at Guantanamo Bay as enemy combatants with the intention of eventually trying them in military commissions.

Of course, Dana Perino's argument assumes that we're at war.  We are.  Even the president says we are.  But many of his supporters believe we're not.  They think we're involved in an inter-cultural dispute created by American triumphalism, Western imperialism, rapacious capitalism, and high-cholesterol Milky Ways dropped on unsuspecting Third World peoples. 

If things go our way in November, sanity may start to prevail.  Until then, we'll have to contend with leftist diehards who are more interested in trying George W. Bush than the terrorists who come to kill us.

February 1, 2010