The Arab world was demanding that the US produce credible evidence against Bin Laden before embarking on hostile action in Afghansitan. Sort of a public trial by press.

Bin Laden was making no real admissions to any guilt & other Arabs insisted that they considered him blameless without clear (in their eyes) evidence to implicate him.

Then US began its action in Afghanistan & turned up highly damaging evidence of OBL complicity plus Bin Laden himself 1st appears in one tape sounding totally guilty, then goes public where he tacitly admitted involvement & knowledge.

So the conundrum is - in times of serious crisis involving national security (where a serious threat is made against the lives and livelihood of all US citizens) should 'public' trials be insisted upon because the concept pleases our righteous sensibilities or should the US do pretty much what it did in Afghanistan (where it took speedy action then delivered the smoking gun) and investigate & try terrorists in private in order to protect delicate & sensisitive information that could harm future success.

To me the answer to the challenge is to allow private trials for a fixed period after which the law automatically reverts & has to be reviewed & agreed to by congress before being re-implemented. I am convinced that there are times when information used in trials of terrorists must be kept *secret* but agree that there must be a timeframe where 'emergency' measures such as the prez & his controllers are putting in place, get *automatically* reverted & *only* allowed to be re-instated after a review by congress. The thread to Democracy has to be a thick one.

It seems that the real issue here is that to fight evil requires evil. So try to restrict the period of counter-evil.

Doug M