>
> Do you believe that the 9/11 crew were determined to commit a
> crime?
I repeat myself. If the 9/11 crew were determined to commit a crime then it is _logically necessary_ that they must have talked among each other about committing their crime. That talk alone, even before they made material preparations (attended flight school, cashed that $100K check from Pakistani ISI, purchased box-cutters, bought plane tickets, etc.) would have been criminal conspiracy, sufficient grounds to arrest them, try them and convict them.
What's more, in your "what-if" scenario, if the 9/11 gang had _not_ been overheard conspiring, then why would the Department of Justice have arrested them, unless DOJ had taken up a policy of preemptively detaining every last middle-Easterner? If DOJ suspected the 9/11 gang it's also _logically necessary_ that they must have had some kind of evidence to compel that suspicion, and if they had that evidence, whatever it was, they'd have had grounds to arrest the gang and try them old-school style.
> And do you believe, in the interest of civil liberties,
> that they should have been "allowed" to commit their crimes,
> because that's just the way we do it here?
This is the kind of nonsense you hear from people who have just got off from watching a "Law & Order" marathon. Why, how _dare_ you say that, you God da...
Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> I don't like issuing pronunciamenti, but the personal insults and
> nastiness on this list must stop. Zero fucking tolerance, just
> like the Man. Violators go on immediate moderation.
...why, you unfortunately misguided comrade, I respectfully disagree!
I wasn't kidding about the "Law & Order" crack though. At the opening of that show a voice-over recites this tag line about how there are two groups which protect the public, cops and prosecutors. Good thing the guy who wrote that went in for screen writing instead of designing suspension bridges. Obviously, protecting the public there are _three_ equally important forces in dynamic equipoise, the third being lawyers, whose job is to keep the first two from going overboard.
Our law enforcement system absolutely does not require we "allow" criminals to "commit their crimes" before taking action. "The way we do it here" includes arresting, trying and convicting people for conspiracy to commit crimes well before their conspiracies are perfected.
The talk-radio crowd assert that the institution of lawyers is bad bad bad, and that granting terrorist conspirators (or felons in general) a fair trial is equivalent to unlocking their cufflinks, handing them back their guns and ski-masks, and ushering them out the police station onto the public streets. But despite the outcomes of the O.J. Simpson and Robert Blake cases, that's absurd. "The way we do it here" actually results in this:
http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/censusstatistic/a/aaprisonpop.htm
> America's prison population topped 2 million inmates for the
> first time in history on June 30, 2002 according to a new
> report from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice
> Statistics (BJS).
>
> The 50 states, the District of Columbia and the federal government
> held 1,355,748 prisoners (two-thirds of the total incarcerated
> population), and local municipal and county jails held 665,475
> inmates.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net