The Legal Approach to Fighting Terror Doesn't Work

In the wake of 9/11, those who were against us taking military action against Afghanistan pushed for us to use the same approach Bill Clinton did in dealing with terror--fighting the threat through legal means. I advocated an approach that involved both use of force and investigations and prosecutions used in tandem. I'm now changing that stand and support force as the main means as we have now seen another court case result in zero convictions for a group accused of plotting a major terror attack:

MIAMI — In a stinging defeat for the Bush administration, one of seven Miami men accused of plotting to join forces with Al Qaeda to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower was acquitted Thursday, and the case against the rest ended in a hung jury.

Federal prosecutor Richard Gregorie said the government planned to retry the six next year, and the judge said a new jury would be picked starting Jan. 7.

The White House had seized on the case to illustrate the dangers of homegrown terrorism and trumpet the government's post-Sept. 11 success in infiltrating and smashing terrorism plots in their earliest stages.

Aside from the fact the AP seems downright giddy that it was a Bush "defeat," the greater implication here is in the last sentence. We've lessened our ability to prosecute terror cases that are discovered in the early stages.

The cases are tough to investigate and tough to litigate, the suspects are usually immigrants who are not part of the mainstream. They also are extremely secretive with most belonging to wahhabist sects that will never provide prosecutors with information to try cases successfully.

The media and the anti-war left scoff that these cases such as the pending "Fort Dix Six" case here in New Jersey are flimsy at best, yet the threat is still very real. Radical Islamists's are probing for a soft spot, a spot they can exploit to attack us again--and this time, it will not be a symbolic but a strategic target.

How dedicated are they to their cause? How about so dedicated they would use tactics such as this as was attempted in the assassination attempt against Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan last month:

A man approached her armored truck, Mrs. Bhutto recounted, and was trying to hand across a small child as her motorcade inched through the thronged streets of Karachi. She remembers gesturing for the man to come closer.

"It was about 1 or 2 years old, and I think it was a girl," Mrs. Bhutto told The Washington Times in her first public remarks about the baby.

"We feel it was a baby, kidnapped, and its clothes were rigged with explosives. He kept trying to hand it to people to hand to me. I'm a mother, I love babies, but the [streetlights] had already gone out, and I was worried about the baby getting dropped or hurt."