U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder insisted gamely last week that Barack Obama's administration is still considering holding the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the master planner of 9/11, in the federal criminal courthouse in Manhattan; but it cannot be. An immense tide of fear and anger has swamped the judicial -- and moral-- calculations that led Holder to his initial choice, rendering the actual merits immaterial beside the suicidal politics. More than eight years after the bombing of the World Trade Center, that fear, and that anger, still cloud Americans' thoughts about the response to terrorism.
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Here is one of the chief ironies of the war on terror: Thanks in part to the Bush administration's aggressive homeland security efforts, we may be objectively safer than we were nine years ago; and yet, thanks to the apocalyptic terms on which Bush and Cheney waged the war on terror, we feel much less safe. We feel terrified. "We're at war in our airports," Scott Brown cried during his Senate campaign in Massachusetts. "We're at war in our shopping malls." We are living in the middle of a monster movie. This is why the politics of the war on terror have reproduced those of the Cold War, making Democrats live in fear of any policy, any gesture, that could be deemed "soft."
After Holder first announced the decision to hold the trial in New York, Obama said, "We have to break ... this fearful notion that somehow our justice system can't handle these guys." It was a notion with no obvious foundation, since nine-tenths of the accused terrorists processed through the criminal-justice system had been found guilty, and no trial had been seriously disrupted. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg initially agreed, saying, "It is fitting that 9/11 suspects face justice near the World Trade Center site, where so many New Yorkers were murdered." As a New Yorker who had emerged from the subway that morning to see the first flames leap from the towers, I felt -- and I foolishly imagined that all New Yorkers would feel -- that holding the trial here offered us a chance to demonstrate our imperturbable urban mettle, to make sure that we, not they, got the last word.
It's true, says Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies in Stockholm, that a public trial could turn KSM "into a superhuman for those terrorists who are his followers." But Ranstorp nevertheless strongly favors such a trial, which, he says, "de-dramatizes the mythology around terrorism." And of course it sends a message about us: That our strength inheres in our democratic principles and practices more than in our military might, that we do not have to annul or sideline our system of criminal justice in order to deal with this new threat, that calling people "terrorists" does not make them either subhuman or superhuman.
The message, however, fell victim to the politics, and to the psychic atmosphere. City officials at first estimated that security for the trial would cost $75 million a year. But on Jan. 6, Bloomberg delivered a letter to the White House putting the cost at $200 million a year, over five years. Two weeks later, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly publicly outlined the plans, which entailed cordoning off several blocks around the courthouse and establishing a wider security zone within which drivers and pedestrians would be subjected to random checks. The trial, Kelly warned, "will raise the threat level of this city," adding, "We will have to look at the entire city as a potential target."
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