Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Max Sawicky wrote:
>
> >In a nutshell,
> >it's a demand to the Gov to find the guilty parties
> >and those closely associated and blow them to kingdom
> >come
>
> I'm curious how many folks here are opposed to tracking down the
> perps and dealing with them in some form, whether it's blowing them
> to kingdom come, or some Fisk-like trial in an international court.
> Is the revolutionary defeatist position that the U.S. should do
> nothing against OBL, assuming it was his crew that did the work?
>
I don't know. In Chicago what I first remember as the "Kelly-Nash Machine" (late 1930s) and is now the administration of the second Mayor Daley has an unbroken record of cooperation with thugs of the worst order. Some of those thugs have been arrested and convicted along the way, others have not, but their trail is a bloody one. Fairly recently Daley was refusing to confirm his relationship with one of his golfing buddies (a crime-sydicate figure). So the mayors of Chicago and their many supporters (including Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas, who owed their political careers to Jake Arvey, a central figure in the machine) have at least as close a connection to murder as have any of the purported supporters, financiers, etc. of the people who hijacked the planes. There is not a lot to choose between Mayor Daley and bin Laden. In the former case the law only imprisons the thugs caught with blood on their hands, not the ultimate source of the evil. Perhaps the same policy should be followed in the case of the hijackers. Chase those, residents of the U.S., who are most directly involved.
In any case, the death penalty is unacceptable for anyone. And before someone starts squawking that I would feel differently if someone close was involved -- my sister-in-law was murdered some years ago, and neither her daughters, her grandchildren, my brother, nor any of the rest of us would support the death penalty for her murderer. He is known to the police but there is insufficient evidence for an arrest. Of course Michigan remains one of the more 'civilzied' states, not having the death penalty. (What some of us would have done had we _immediately_ gotten our hands on him is perhaps a different story. But spontaneous reactions are irrelevant.)
Carrol