False Victories in the War on Terror
by Karen J. Greenberg and Tom Engelhardt

Overall, despite all the hype, the Department of Justice's record in terrorism cases is unimpressive indeed, and even that record now faces a new hurdle – if information, however paltry, has been gained from suspects by illegal coercion or, in the case of suspects held abroad, through torture, it may prove inadmissible in future court cases against other suspects. This will be yet another setback in the legal confrontation with terrorism.

Perhaps this paltry and flawed record can be explained by the administration's well-known lack of belief in the importance of law enforcement in the War on Terror. As Bush suggested in his last State of the Union Address, and other top officials have emphasized elsewhere, the War on Terror is not supposed to be about law enforcement at all but about the use of force, about taking the fight to the terrorists by whatever means are necessary outside the United States. Another reasonable conclusion might be that, for all the color-coded alerts we've lived through, there just aren't that many terrorists among us – at least not al-Qaeda-related ones.

Full story here.