‘A dead terrorist is a good terrorist’ and a fine example

We are better than the terrorists are. But do we need to do them one better by committing national suicide to prove it?

In the New York Post this morning, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters in part writes:

Recent events should have made it clear — again — that captive terrorists are overwhelmingly a liability. The meager intelligence we get interrogating them is rarely commensurate with the array of financial, moral and legal costs involved in keeping them locked up.

Worst of all (as I’ve repeatedly argued), a jailed terrorist, not a dead one, is the true “martyr.” Incarcerated terrorists become celebrated causes for our domestic left and rallying points for foreign fanatics. The dead just rot.

Later, Peters adds:

A dead terrorist is a good terrorist. Keeps costs down, too.

To be clear: I do not advocate executing prisoners. We should treat any terrorist we capture rigorously, but with basic decency. I would only condone forceful interrogation methods in the most exceptional cases (there are always exceptions in real life, once you leave the rarefied air of the law library or the campus).

And killing terrorists doesn’t put us on a “slippery slope.” Killing Osama or Ayman al-Zawahiri wouldn’t inevitably mean that our Special Forces would then turn to assassinating Iowa aldermen or Alabama church deacons.

Or the families of American lawyers (my words added to Mr. Peters’ latter thought).

It seems noble to assert that non-American, unlawful enemy combatants on kinetic battlefields and aiding them — even those targeting civilians — should be afforded the very rule of law they would deny us.

Among those pulverized on 9/11 were eight precious children 11-years-old and younger, including one toddler of which nothing was found. We placed those wee souls at greater risk when we provided due process to the Landmark bomb plotters and those who attacked the World Trade Center in 1993. If we now unilaterally provide foreign terrorists caught on foreign ground full legal rights, we will reap many smaller funeral plots on that moral high ground.

Our light to the world’s children now flickers in a growing gale of political crosswinds.

Perhaps that means many suspected terrorists must be destroyed and some greatly discomforted. We should not choose to lose this war and let our distaste for their misfortune extinguish liberty’s brightest flame, for their children’s sake as well as our own.

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