Via Glenn Reynolds, James Taranto makes a very important point I think is being missed in the debate over the trial of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in New York:

one man's technicality is another's violation of due process; and the corollary of treating KSM like ordinary criminals is treating ordinary criminals like KSM. This column approves of aggressive interrogation to gather intelligence from terrorists, but there is little doubt that some of the methods that were used would have been abusive had they been applied by law-enforcement agents to domestic criminal suspects.

When appellate courts decide questions of law, they set precedents for future cases. If they make allowances for the exigencies of the war on terror in order to uphold convictions of KSM and his associates, it could end up diminishing the rights of ordinary criminal defendants. That's why the smart civil-libertarian position is to oppose trying terrorists as civilians.

Not unless we really do return to 9/10 and roll back the Patriot Act, Homeland Security, and the extraordinary powers that the government has accumulated since 9/11. It's easy for Barack Obama to pose as an opponent of the war on terror, but does anyone actually expect him to relinquish federal executive power? I don't.

And that is why it makes me very nervous to see him bringing the war home.

Say what you want about Bush, but one of the things I most liked about him was that to a large extent, he externalized the war on terror. He kept it OVER THERE -- where it belonged, and I think that's one of the reasons people liked him. (At least, it may explain why they preferred his war strategy to John Kerry's police strategy.)

Bringing the war home is an old 1960s anti-war slogan, and as we close down Guantanamo and bring the worst terrorists in the world right here, as we disengage from and mismanage Iraq and Afghanistan, we literally bring the enemy to this country, where we propose to treat them as domestic criminals. And if terrorists are treated as domestic criminals, why shouldn't domestic criminals be treated as terrorists?

In this and in so many ways, the war on terror is being conflated with the war on crime. And we know how well the war on crime has gone, don't we? Crime is considered just one of those things that we just have to live with. Except that more and more things are being made crimes, and more and more crimes are being equated with terrorism. The Homeland Security and Patriot Act provisions are now routinely invoked against all kinds of regular criminals. Gangs and terrorists are being linked together as national security threats. (I guess "West Side Story" morphed into "West Bank Story" in some bureaucrat's utopian scheme.) No doubt the War on Drugs won't be far behind -- no doubt rebadged as the "War on NarcoTerrorism" or some equally conflationary Orwellianism.

Glenn also links Shannon Love, who is thinking along similar lines:

The greatest danger posed in the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) isn't that he will go free. The greatest danger is that he will be convicted and that during his appeals the courts will ratify all of the extraordinary measures used to capture and convict him. The great danger is that the courts will ratify the rough, inaccurate and ambiguous norms of martial law as applying to all civil criminal trials.

After a couple of decades of these court decisions reverberating throughout the legal system, we could end up living under de facto martial law.

I wish we still had a president who kept them -- and the war -- where they belonged.

Over there.