There's an Abe Vigoda Bridge?

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Pete Peevester here. Once a year my dad will pull out this musty old one-liner (I sound like readers digest, don't I):

He drums his fingers on his cheek and asks "what is this?" Answer: Bunch of jews walking to temple.

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These people are jailhouse converts to Islam. Obviously the brand of Islam they converted to was that of the Jihady type. People who regularly listen to sermons by any of these sheiks don'y need the FBI's help to think of and plan to murder Jews.

Maybe with the mafia or bank robbers you are correct, but these believing and faithful men already had the spiritual strength to kill without any help.

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Notwithstanding whether you think this is a "set up." How about the fact that there are people who think that it's ok to plant explosives in front of synagogues where there are pre-schools?

If someone gave you a gun, and suggested that you kill someone, would you do it?

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Interesting. All those people who insist that our prisons are capable of holding the Gitmo savages don't seem to factor in the damage they can do in converting and/or radicalizing thugs who are in prison for lesser crimes and will soon be released back into civilization.

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They would be legally entitled to meet with their lawyers, and translators (one of which was involved in the Stewart-Blind Sheikh plot), even in SuperMax.

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Plenty of people in our prisons are in there for shit like armed robbery and once they get out, do we really want them to have spent at least some of their incarceration being indoctrinated by radical Islamists?

As for our "black sites run by the military," how many people who had no intention of committing jihad on us have been converted into terrorists because of these places?

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To your last point, I doubt there are any real hard numbers, but I'll point this out: plenty of people fought with us against Saddam Hussein because of relatives he held (and tortured or killed) in Abu Ghraib before the invasion. So yes, I think it is reasonable to assume that holding people outside of justifiable circumstances and leagal, humanitarian oversight will produce an unknown quantity of people willing to fight us just because of that. I'll remind you: they don't have to go far to kill Americans, we are in their home towns. The ones recruiting can easily point at one of our soldiers and say "how do you know that isn't the man that kidnapped and tortured your brother/son/husband?"

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On your last point, if we were to treat all captured terrorists like petty thugs who get the whole panoply of legal rights that we give common criminals here, would that end terrorist acts against us? As I recall, that's pretty much how we were treating captured terrorists from 1993 (1st WTC bombing) until 9/11/2001.

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To me, it's absurd to bring them here and haul them into court, as if they'd just mugged someone or stuck up a bodega.

What happens if the arresting soldier doesn't read a terrorist the Miranda warning while apprehending him? Does he get to go free?

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Yet I can't remember how many times in the summer of 2004, when the media decided that we had a really bad economy you would hear something like "In a blow to the Bush Administration, the Dow fell 130 points." Funny, because I can't think of a worse time for the economy than 2004, can you? However, you can see how any significant occurancee will be used to pump up or slam an administration.

Prior to 9/11 the US had nothing but failures in dealing with terrorists.

1993 - First World Trade Center Attack

1995 - Oklahoma City

1996- Khobar Towers (Not the US, but an attack on it's citizens.

1998 - African Embassies

2000 - USS Cole

September 11, 2001 - Attacks on multiple targets in the US.

Since 9/11 we have been attacked outside of the country, but nothing successful has occurred in the US. In fairness, there were a number of attacks on US citizens and military throughout the 80's. I just didn't want to list them.

Anyway, I have inside information that Cheney never abdicated his power and that it was his rogue faction of the government that uncovered the Newburgh plot. Before I get attacked, the last part was a joke.

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You would have to have access to a lot of very privileged information -- more than just the general media record -- in order to make this statement with any credibility. I propose that no one commenting on Gawker is in that category.

Since 9/11 we have been attacked outside of the country, but nothing successful has occurred in the US.

Plenty of successful attacks of violence have occurred inside this country since 9/11 -- every year. Whether you call the perpetrators "terrorists" or "criminals" just seems like a trivial semantic distinction to me.

Although I will note that many of the attackers did use weapons -- firearms -- that other nations regulate more closely and seem to suffer fewer attacks from.

So if limiting "attacks" is your litmus test for political leadership, I presume you favor much stricter gun laws in the U.S. I can certainly see the logic of that position.

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Homegrown terrorists are more often than not just nutjobs. Doesn't matter who is president, they'll find some excuse to blow shit up.

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The context of this conversation was terror attacks. Depending on what sort of definition one wants to use for terrorist attacks, the massacre at Virginia Tech, for instance, could be considered a terrorist attack. However, I think that most people would agree that individual acts of violence like muggings or convenience store robberies, are not terrorism as we have come to think of it.

Because you are being uncharacteristically particular today, I will make sure I use the adjective "terrorist" with "attack" to differentiate from domestic crime. At least until I forget.

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One thing GWB's Administration tried to get right was its brief attempt to replace the "War on Terror" shibboleth with another one: The Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism -- undermining "terrorism" by denying it that potent but empty name. That's a GWB policy I'd like Obama to follow, even if GWB himself lost faith in it.

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While it's easy to make post hoc judgments that those additional tactical decisions were mistakes, I withhold my own judgment for two reasons: 1) I'm not in a position to judge the quality of most of those intervening decisions, and 2) Despite the outcome, the balance of risk vs. possible success might still have made a "go" decision defensible.

Speaking more generally, if you argue that the U.S. military has no place in trying to stabilize a country undergoing a humanitarian disaster like Somalia's, that's a defensible position to take and you won't be alone. I think that's the debate that this country should be having, especially during the ongoing Iraq and Darfur crises, and I think replacing the "War on Terror" language with something more like the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism would be a positive step in framing that debate.

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