Influential blogger Andrew Sullivan, for whom the subject of torture and prisoner mistreatment has long been an ongoing obsession, rued the fact that Mohammed can't be brought to trial in our criminal justice system because of the way Mohammed was handled at Gitmo. The fact that our criminal justice system, given its current state, wouldn't be able to effectively deliver justice in such a case without turning it into an undignified circus that would insult the memory of Mohammed's thousands of victims seems not to affect Sullivan. Rather, Mohammed's confession revealed where Sullivan's thinking remains — firmly and narrowly fixed on what he calls torture. So constrained is this worldview, all other concerns, both moral and pragmatic, can't possibly manage to wrestle their way into the picture.
Los Angeles Times writer Tim Rutten penned a column that reflected Sullivan's concern about a trial in our system of justice while celebrating his own moral vanity. "The confession set the pundit pack baying in full cry," wrote Rutten. "We've now had 72 hours of faux-Churchillian fulmination on 'evil' and 'monsters' and 'the clash of civilizations' and 'a new era' that makes no allowance for the old-fashioned niceties concerning human rights and due process."
Way out there on the loony left, Rosie O'Donnell perhaps outdid herself, expressing sympathy for Mohammed, defending his "humanity" and lamenting that he and other terrorists are "treated like animals." She then offered her own intelligence assessment of Mohammed's importance, saying, "But I just think, this man for whatever he did or didn't do, he is not the be all, end all of terrorism in America. And our government has not found the answer in this one way [unintelligible]."
Speaking on behalf of sensible people everywhere, the editors at National Review published a trenchant editorial on the subject of Mohammed that looks forward to Mohammed receiving the "swift and relentless justice" that he so obviously deserves. National Review concluded its editorial by noting, "Thousands are dead because of him. Thousands will die yet if we slacken in our resolve to defeat his comrades still plotting against us."
Amazingly, five scant years removed from Sept. 11, we have every reason to believe that not only are such sentiments not universal, they may in fact be held by only a minority of the country that not so long ago knew it was in a fight for its very survival.