U.S. News: Gloria Borger on life, liberty, and the law (6/24/02) eloquently expresses my own feelings of ambivalence and concern about how we should respond to people like Jose Padilla, and John Walker Lindh.

It is manifestly stupid to treat every suspected terrorist as a common criminal. The trial of the first WTC bombers let slip the fact that we were tapping bin Laden's satellite phone calls, with the result that we have now lost that source of intelligence. On the other hand, it doesn't seem likely that Lindh is going to be a source of intelligence, so we try him in the normal criminal courts. But what if he beats the rap? Apparently it's a lot harder to be a traitor than we once thought. It's also a lot harder to lose one's citizenship than most of us would have thought, if John Lindh or Jose Padilla can claim the panoply of rights that any innocent person has. We now have heard about many more Americans who have undergone al Qaeda training.

My own feeling, and apparently Gloria Borger's, is that we should have enough faith in our leaders to trust them to protect us against such people without abusing this power. It is a sad thing that so many commentators seem to assume that all power will be abused. Why do we assume that our judges are immune, or that they necessarily have better judgement about what is necessary to protect our people from terrorists?

This is a special situation that calls for special measures, and we shouldn't allow politics or ideologies to prevent us from using common sense. This is part of the responsibility and duty of every citizen, to support and assist the authorities to protect society, instead of putting rights above every other consideration.