>
>Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>>Without exception, every single proposal for punishing them is going to
>>have the result, if carried into practice, of _certainly_ killing and
>>disrupting the lives of 10s of thousands of people and STILL not
>>necessarily catching or punishing the bad guys.
>>
>>That's good?
>
>So you do nothing? And that's not a rhetorical question.
>
>Doug
Look, Carrol. We have a very serious crime, mass murder, in fact. Doing nothing about is not an option. I do not support war, but there is a fairly well-established protolocal for a criminal investigation. You gather evidence, identify suspects with probable cause, find 'em, and bust 'em. In this case there is the added problem that they are (apparently) under the protection of a hostile nation. By "apparently," I meand if it's OBL. The Guardian and Le Monde think there's pretty decent evidence; it's summarized in the current edition of the Guardian Weekly. A lot of it had to do with chasing the money. Assume it's him and his lot. The Taliban was, at least before we started bombing, at least hypothetically open to listening to the evidence. If we had laid it out, and I can understand not laying all of it out in public, if it would endanger confidental informants, and they had still said Boo!, we'd be ina stronger position morally and legally. We should still insist on its being laid out, along with stopping the war. The war complicates things; we might have been able to buy cooperation, as indeed we probably could have paid Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait if we had wanted to. But we should demand extradition to the International Court of Justice, or even here--we sure as hell have jurisdiction. If the T won't cooperate, we can try to have them isolated, bring various pressure to bear, etc. We could see if some potentially legitimate Afghani alternative government would request a UN force of Rangers to find him. There's loads of stuff that could be done without killing anyone or disrupting too many lives. jks
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