JK not mentioned, but here's yet another John Kerry was (is) right moment

[Island Blue]

What impeccable timing, KSM!

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed may have diverted attention from Alberto Gonzales, but the 9/11 plotter's testimony exposes the flaws in Bush's 'war on terror.'

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-brooks16mar16,0,3666636.column?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

....

KSM's claim of moral equivalence may go over well with people alienated by post-9/11 U.S. policies, but it is dangerously misleading. U.S. failures and abuses are real and should be condemned by all of us. But nothing justifies the deliberate slaughter of innocents. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were neither legitimate acts of war nor some excusable "exception" but a hideous crime, a mass murder of appalling dimension.

From the beginning, the Bush administration should have called terrorism what it is: an ambitious form of lethal and complex criminality that at times requires a military response as well as a political and police response. And it should have called KSM what he is: not an "enemy combatant" in a war but a brutal criminal, someone who, as Human Rights Watch's John Sifton puts it, deserves the same fate as "child molesters and serial killers" — ignominious trial and conviction.

Putting KSM on trial as the criminal he is would not have precluded U.S. military action against Al Qaeda targets on foreign territory. But it would have made it harder for KSM to wrap himself in the mantle of a freedom fighter and present himself as a "combatant" comparable to George Washington.

Sigh.

[beachmom]

1. Everything the WH does is born out of politics.

Reducing the terrorists to the criminals they are may have been the right policy and a good narrative to undermine al Qaeda; but that's not how you win elections. In light of what we know and continue to know about Karl Rove, his goal is power, not helping this country. We have to accept that our country is being run by a gang of criminals bent on grabbing more power with the interests of the American people the furthest thing from their minds.

[karynnj]

2. That may also explain why they jumped so quickly

to accuse Kerry of treating it like a law enforcement problem - implying that that would mean only arresting people after they did something. Completely ignoring that law enforcement does act to proactively thwart planned crimes.