@obamathered #21:

Just so I’m clear, are you blaming the fact that Bin Ladin hasn’t been captured or killed on Obama? Beyond that, the reason has something to do with polling? As in, there are polls that show Americans don’t want him captured or killed?

From someone who has posted some fundamentally stupid comments in the past . . . this is far and away the most laughable crap you’ve ever typed. Oddly, I’m both disgusted and somewhat in awe at the sheer brass balls blaming Bin Ladin’s survival on Obama takes.

Well done?

Now THAT should be televised. Hell, make it pay-per-view.

You are simply talking past me, past the issues that Rick raised, and past this thread.

The debate was not over whether KSM would be convicted. It was over the question of whether we could do so safely.

The examples I gave went to the fact that we and others were able to prosecute terrorists and did so without incurring intolerable dangers. That’s what we are talking about. You are talking about something different.

Now, it’s a free country, so if yo want to go on debating an entirely different topic with some imaginary opponent, okay by me, just don’t expect a response.

Um… Maybe you need to talk to some other people. NY’ers, as a whole, are overwhelmingly supportive, from the Mayor to the city council, on down.

Grow a pair.

“Meanwhile New Yorkers enjoy another bagel.”

If you’re going to keep this stuff up, you will need to find another excuse when New Yorkers’ opinions begin to get noticed. I live in New York and every one I talk to is either bewildered or furious that Obama is doing this.

I’ve dealt with the UK-IRA example. Now whate about the first one you threw out above:

“We tried the Lincoln conspirators in Washington — a city that had been very close to being lost to CSA forces on several occasions — despite the fact that armed bands of Confederate sympathizers were still around.”

Yeah, we tried them in Washington, and Washington had once been threatened by Confederate forces, but by May 1865, the Confederacy couldn’t threaten anyone any longer and Lee had surrendered. There might have been Confederate “armed bands” roaming Missouri, but DC was a Union armed camp.

But far more important was the nature of that trial of the Booth conspirators. They were tried by a Military Commission ordered into existence by President Andrew Johnson, based solely on an opinion of the Attorney General to the effect that the assassination was an act of war and without so much as asking Congress’s opinion. The Commission of nine officers convened less than a month after Lincoln was shot and four days after he was buried (swift justice in those days). By the President’s order, the Commission itself was tasked with setting up its own procedures and rules, which were generally fair to the accused but would be well short of ACLU demands. The accused were tried and convicted and several sentenced to death before mid-July. When the death sentence was handed down to be carried out promptly, lawyers for the convicted managed to get a Supreme Court Justice to issue a writ of habeus corpus to review the proceedings.

Acting entirely on his own authority, President Johnson quashed the writ — in effect, ignoring it — and ordered the hangings to take place, as scheduled, which they did.

So is this the justice you would have us impose on KSM? I’d be thrilled. And if we could figure on getting KSM and his cohorts to the hangman by three months from now, there would be little reason to worry about al Qaeda havingn time to organize any new terror atacks on NYC.

But I’d settle for trying him before the Military Commissions created by Congress expressly for that purpose, with their myriad of due process protections and indpeendent military judges.

It’s been like that from the start. A bunch of red-staters from places bin Laden’s never even heard of run around demanding we round up Muslims, stockpile guns, torture anyone who looks at us cross-eyed and just generally freak out like a bunch of little girls seeing a tarantula.

Meanwhile New Yorkers enjoy another bagel.

So why are a bunch of Texans and Kentuckians and people who live far far away wringing their hands about what might happen to NYC? Sheesh. I