Can We Get Serious Again, Please?

James Taranto - OpinionJournal.com

Today's atrocity could have occurred in New York--or in Washington, Chicago, San Francisco or any other major American city. Indeed, we shouldn't have to remind anyone that an attack on a much worse scale happened in the U.S. less than four years ago--though it often seems as though certain people don't remember.

After all, what were American politicians doing while the terrorists were planning this morning's attack? The House, led by self-described socialist Bernie Sanders, was voting to prevent terror investigators from looking at library records. Rep. Charles Rangel was likening the liberation of Iraq to the Holocaust. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, was urging the administration to treat al Qaeda terrorists as civilians and comparing American servicemen to Nazis.

Closer to London, the Associated Press reported on Tuesday that "a Belgian lawmaker's report calls for the United States to shut down its detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and send detainees to their home countries:

"We recommend terminating the Guantanamo detention facility," said the report's author, Anne Marie Lizin, who is also the Socialist president of the Belgian Senate. She said keeping the camp open was damaging the reputation of the United States and causing the "radicalization" of detainees.

As if al Qaeda was moderate before the Guantanamo camp opened. Andrew Sullivan said it well back in January 2002:

The debate over whether to treat the al Qaeda terrorists and murderers at Camp X-Ray as prisoners of war seems to me a no-brainer. To be a prisoner of war requires that you observe the rules of war. A critical part of those rules is that you wear insignia clearly identifying you as a member of a particular army. Al Qaeda did no such thing. Another critical component is that you obey the laws of war. Among those rules, in Yale professor Ruth Wedgwood's words, are also: "never deliberately attack civilians, and never seek disproportionate damage to civilians in pursuit of another objective."

Al Qaeda, of course, massacred thousands of civilians as a deliberate act. These terrorists are not soldiers. They are beneath such an honorific. They are not even criminals. In that respect, Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's contempt for the whines of those complaining about poor treatment is fully justified. And vast majorities of Britons and Americans agree with them.

National Review's Jonah Goldberg quotes a reader who points out that violence such as London saw this morning "is what the people in Gitmo would rather be doing." It shouldn't take another terrorist attack to remind us of that fact.