The most necessary story of the young year is Jane Mayer’s article in the most recent issue of The New Yorker. It’s called The Trail, and it very carefully picks through the discussion about what legal powers we can bring to bear terrorists like the Underpants Bomber and the other dangerous individuals whom we have ensnared in this war on terror. As Mayer makes clear, former Vice President Dick Cheney and William Kristol and Senator Scott Cosmopolitan and the others who would deny these detainees basic legal rights are simply wrong as a matter of law. There is no mechanism for turning such people over to the army. The Bush administration tried it. The Supreme Court said the government couldn’t do it. (In other words, Dick, when you took Juan Padilla and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, and turned them over to the military to be held indefinitely without charges, you were the outlaw.)
I have an inherent suspicion of political leaders who try to frighten their citizens. There is no lower leadership technique, and Dick Cheney is the master of this dark art. One reason is that one can never entirely dismiss such a warning; once uttered, it hangs in the air like the raving visions of a deranged hermit, always ready to snatch hold a passing pretext that could be pressed into service as a validation. But unless al-quada gets hold of weapons of mass destruction–and 
where is there any sense that they have?–they represent no greater threat to America than did the Barbary Pirates. A menace, yes; capable of causing great pain and suffering, for sure; a scourge that must be eradicated, no doubt. But to pretend that it is more, and to argue for its eradication through the abrogation of normal procedures and basic rights, is political posturing and rank demagogy.
We have seen this act before. Frightened by bombs and demonstrations and strikes, political leaders in the twenties locked people up and deprived them of their rights and deported them. They were attempting to assert control, and within a couple years, we were ashamed of them. In the forties, frighted by Imperial Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, our leaders rounded up the Nisei and, depriving them of their freedom and their property, relocated them in concentration camps in our barren 
and isolated inland. After a few years, we were ashamed of them. In the fifties, frightened by a Soviet Union that used spies in our ranks to learn our atomic secrets, some of our leaders sought to destroy the lives of anyone who had any kind of socialist connection. And it didn’t take very long for people to become ashamed of them.
I’m ashamed now. It’s embarrassing to hear Dick Cheney say on a Sunday talk show that he supports water-boarding. It’s humiliating to think that he can say that still be accorded any respect whatsover. It’s time we stood up and made it clear: Khalid Sheik Muhammad and Juan Padilla and Captain Underpants have these rights not because they are God’s children and deserving of a lawyer in the court room and a teddy bear at night. They have these rights because we’re Americans, and it is our strength that we hold to a way of life insists on rules, that we greet their depravity and disregard of human life with confidence in our institutions and the majesty of law. The contrast could not be greater. We do this because we’re Americans, and if we react to their provocations by abandoning who we are, then truly, the terrorists have won.