What happened to urban mettle? The city's top security official was saying that the cost of holding the trial in New York was paralyzing Lower Manhattan and exposing the metropolitan area to the threat of terrorist attack. Of course that was too high a price to pay -- in every sense. The Real Estate Board of New York established movethetrial.com, a website whose central proposition was that the trial "will strangle the already weakened local economy." The effective imprisonment of Lower Manhattan would, in the supreme nightmare scenario, bring co-op and condo sales to a halt. New York's business and civic elite began to close ranks against the trial. On Jan. 27, Bloomberg reversed himself, suggesting the Justice Department move the trial to a military base somewhere.
But was it, in fact, necessary to choose between the trial and the city's security, and economy, and daily life? In other parts of the world, high-security terrorism trials are accepted as a fact of modern life. Irish terrorists used to be routinely tried in Belfast's Crumlin Road courthouse on the ethnic dividing line of a city seething with terrorist sympathizers. The Old Bailey, the setting for many such trials, sits in the middle of London. The trial of the 29 men accused of masterminding the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, which killed 191 people, featured a bomb-proof chamber for the defendants; but the intense security did not make city life grind to a halt. (I cannot say what happened to condo sales.) Peter Clarke, the former head of counterterrorism for Scotland Yard and now a fellow at New York University's Center on Law and Security, told me, "You have to accept that it is virtually impossible to exclude risk. And then you have to decide who owns that risk." Political leaders must be willing to take responsibility. (But Clarke also noted that the British have moved the most notorious trials to the high-security court at Belmarsh, at the edge of London -- a solution worth considering for the future.)
So why wouldn't the famously pugnacious Bloomberg own that risk? Or rather, why didn't he push back when Kelly presented his asphyxiating plan? I don't know the mayor's motivation; given the police commissioner's own sterling record as a public servant and the growing opposition of the business community, Bloomberg would have had to believe very deeply in holding the trial in the shadow of the World Trade Center. Perhaps he didn't. An avowed pragmatist, the mayor might well have concluded that this was scarcely a battle worth taking up.
Could Bloomberg have succeeded by reminding New Yorkers of their native moxie? I suspect not. One of the hallmarks of our era is that when security is placed in balance with some other principle, security almost always wins. Look at the outcry over moving prisoners from Guantánamo to the U.S. mainland. When the Justice Department tried last fall to resettle two (likely harmless) Chinese Uighurs in Virginia, the hysterical reaction led Congress to bar the government from moving any detainees to U.S. soil, save for trial. The proposal to move others to supermax prisons in this country led to a nationwide NIMBY backlash. A few dozen craggly detainees had been endowed with a kind of radioactive menace.
New York's mayor and police commissioner thus put the president and the attorney general in the impossible position of advocating core democratic principles in the face of security concerns. That's a loser. Last week, Obama ruefully acknowledged that "if you have a city that is saying no, and a police department that is saying no, and a mayor that is saying no, that makes it difficult." But you can't just blame them: All of us are running scared.
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