RIP DAD. (Ed Reed)

A certain pop star who has no right to be, in light of his outrageous and offensive behavior over the years, recently showed off a neck tattoo of what looks like a battered woman who may or may not be his ex-girlfriend. It is an act that only confirms his sub-humanity, his despicablity, his worthlessness.

Fortunately, there are better people in the world than this.

Neck tattoos are deplorable as a rule, but perhaps today, we have found one of the rare instances where they are acceptable, even admirable: as a permanent memorial to a loved one lost. This picture was taken by the mayor's photographer Ed Reed at the September 11 anniversary ceremony this morning. "RIP DAD," the script reads.

(Photo: Weasel Zippers)

After Paul Krugman said the anniversary of Sept. 11 was an “occasion for shame” yesterday, bloggers and pundits sprang to action, one accusing the New York Times columnist of being a “smug coward,” others asking if the “hack” should be fired.

Even former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tweeted: “After reading Krugman’s repugnant piece on 9/11, I canceled my subscription to the New York Times this AM.”

Because of the heated response from conservatives  (with commenting on the blog disabled no less), Krugman responded today, reiterating his belief that politicians used the tragedy for—what else—political gain:

"It was a time when tough talk was confused with real heroism, whenpeople who made speeches, then feathered their own political orfinancial nests, were exalted along with – and sometimes above – thosewho put their lives on the line, both on the evil day and after."

Fox News' Megyn Kelly asked if the Times should fire the columnist, but, why would they? Even The New York Times could use traffic a good 9/11 controversy drives.

Smith.

The French expatriates of Manhattan, at least the ones not occupied with fashion week, gathered last night for a Patti Smith concert at Webster Hall. The concert honored the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001. The show was free, recorded by France’s Inter Radio for broadcast tonight in Europe.

After an introduction, in French, there was a lag as Ms. Smith prepared for her performance. From our place on the balcony, The Observer felt slightly out of place, surrounded as we were by a dozen or so beautifully middle-aged French women with impeccable blond bobs, pressed Oxford shirts, large pearl earrings, and even one with a leather mini-backpack. Air kisses echoed around us. Michael Stipe stood to our right, behind a velvet rope and flanked by middle-aged Frenchmen who wore sport coats with hooded sweatshirts underneath. We remarked upon the general ruddy good health of French people in their fifties.

Ms. Smith began, as she often does, with an easy rendition of “Redondo Beach,” her longtime guitarist Lenny Kaye by her side. At first she spoke not a word to her Francophone audience. She was, it seemed, initially determined to avoid all faux newscaster melancholia or forced homily. Only after several songs did she obliquely reference September 11, shifting abruptly from “Birdland” into a poem about the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“It was the first day of spring,” read Ms. Smith, a pair of wire-rimmed glasses balanced on her nose and a book of her poems in her hand. She looked up. “It was the first day of spring. That’s what I’m remembering this week.”

She sang “Ghost Dance,” palms upraised, after which the French women conferred about the lyrics of the chorus. “We shall leeve again,” they decided, nodding to one another and exchanging more kisses with suddenly-noticed late arrivals. Ms. Smith covered a Rolling Stones song, “Playing with Fire,” then finally addressed the audience directly.

“François,” she said. “Hola. Le bibliotheque.” The crowd cheered.

“Yes, I took a year of French in high school and ou est le biblioteque will follow me. From country to country and city to city,” Ms. Smith said dreamily. “When I cross the threshold I will say ou est le bibliotheque and there will be all the books in the world.”

Ms. Smith sang “We Three,” her homage to the band Television. Then she stopped again.

“Quoi?” she asked.

“Ici est le bibliotheque!” someone yelled out (we think -- we also took high school French).

Ms. Smith moodily scanned the room. “I’m sorry I haven’t been very talkative,” she said. “I know we were all expecting something profound but you’re not going to get it. That’s the way I am.” Defiant, she began singing “Pissing in a River.”

But maybe Ms. Smith just needed to warm up a bit. She sang “Because the Night,” and another couple of songs. Then she began thinking out loud.

“In the last ten years what have we done to create a better world?” she asked. She listed: Guantanamo Bay; the imprisonment of John Walker Lindh as “a scapegoat”; the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and the recent bombing of Libya. “I had great hopes on September 12 that we could communicate and rebuild our world," she continued. “I think we haven’t done a very good job of that.”

It’s hard to describe what happened next. Ms. Smith caught the spirit. She played a medley of “Horses” and “Gloria” that brought her audience to a frenzy of emotion. She incanted: “We are alive. We are alive. This is a new time. We don’t want any more fucking wars. We want freedom.”

The concert ended with an encore, of course, and with Ms. Smith worked into an inspiring rage. “You can’t bring a fucking bottle of shampoo on an airplane,” she yelled, to a roared response (the middle-aged French ladies had by then disappeared, in a flurry of kissed farewells).

“We remember,” she yelled. “We remember! We remember EVERYTHING!” Then she ripped the strings off her guitar.

Waldman. (Photo: Pieter M. van Hattem)

Amy Waldman did not read most of the 9/11 novels before she started writing her own. DeLillo, Amis, Updike, Foer—she didn’t need to read them. Ms. Waldman was in New York on the day itself, in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion and in South Asia as the United States dug in to combat in Iraq. Having watched the new world order evolve both here and abroad, the book that she eventually decided to write is more a synthesis of her firsthand experience as a reporter than an examination of collective memory. But what’s remarkable about her new counterfactual novel about the World Trade Center, The Submission, is that it will likely be remembered as one of the first satires of post-9/11 New York City: a place where tragedy is exploited by the ambitious and powerful to self-interested ends. Ms. Waldman’s New York, in other words, is one where sacred cows are routinely slaughtered—starting with the gingerbread reconstruction of “the vanished towers” (never to be named in the book) baked by the chef at Gracie Mansion. “The shapes were unmistakable,” Ms. Waldman writes. “It’s not meant to be eaten,” says her chef.

The Submission begins with a simple premise: the winner of a blind contest to design the 9/11 memorial (though the date itself is never mentioned) turns out to be a Muslim. Political cacophony ensues as reporters inflame hysteria, politicians exploit prejudice, surviving family members affect grief in the service of self-promotion and community activists manipulate identity politics. At issue is the memorial itself: is it a space for sober meditation or is it an “Islamic garden” that “memorializes Jihadis”? The problem is exacerbated when the garden’s designer, Mohammad Khan, refuses to declare his design one or the other.

“I didn’t really think of it as a 9/11 novel as I was writing it,” said Ms. Waldman recently during an interview at a coffee shop near her home in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. “It was just this particular scenario was interesting to me. I wasn’t particularly interested in trying to capture that day in fiction because I felt like we all had lived through it so many times, on the day itself and then in endless replays.”

If Ms. Waldman is acting in a literary tradition, it is not that of the 9/11 novel but rather the striated New York society of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, where characters glide seamlessly forward in their individual trajectories until an upset forces them to collide.

Ms. Waldman said she tried to avoid mixing up her characters with real-life players. She contemplated meeting with Michael Arad, the memorial’s real-life designer (he’s a London-born Israeli-American) but decided against it, saying that she would feel a reportorial responsibility to stick to the facts (a spokesman for Mr. Arad said the architect had not read the novel). Some characters are impossible to disguise, however (The “flamboyant real estate mogul with a toupee and an inestimable fortune”? The “president who once owned a baseball team”?) And the city’s newspapers, of course, are characters by name. The New York Post, the Daily News and even The Observer, which illustrates an article about Mo Khan with “a color drawing showing an ominous-looking Mo looming over a shrunken Manhattan.”

Ms. Waldman grew up in Los Angeles and studied at Yale. After graduating from college in 1992 she went to work as a volunteer teacher in South Africa, first in Cape Town and later in Johannesburg, picking up freelance reporting jobs along the way. Taking advantage of the momentous political shifts in the waning days of apartheid, Ms. Waldman got her first bylines in The Times, working for Bill Keller, who was then stationed there as a reporter.

“Amy was stringing, mostly for alt-weeklies, when I met her in South Africa,” Mr. Keller recalled via email. “She always seemed to be in the right place—the protest, the campaign rally—arriving in a bright yellow V.W. bug that resembled an engorged bumble bee. I hired her to help out so that I could be in more places at once, but she also wrote several pieces under her own byline.”

He remembered in particular a “smart piece” Ms. Waldman wrote about death row inmates who could not vote but were anxiously monitoring the rise of the African National Congress, which had promised to abolish the death penalty. “I like to claim that I discovered her, but the truth is I just got lucky,” he wrote.

Ms. Waldman returned to the United States in 1994 and went to work as an editor at The Washington Monthly, a famous training ground for young reporters. Joseph Lelyveld, then executive editor of The New York Times, hired Ms. Waldman in 1997. She started out on the metro beat, first in Brooklyn doing night rewrites and later in the Bronx and Harlem.

On Sept. 11, 2001 Ms. Waldman was in the office early to cover the mayoral primary election scheduled for that day. She had just arrived in the lobby when she heard people discussing that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. By the time she arrived upstairs, the second plane had hit. She spent that first day making phone calls to companies that had offices in the towers and within a few days had begun reporting from the site itself. Her stories from that time are echoed in the pages of her novel: she wrote about law firms and banks trying to account for the employees who worked in the World Trade Center; about homemade memorials placed around the site; about letters written to cleanup crews by schoolchildren; about the families of deceased firemen in Staten Island and about an American imam in Brooklyn.

Six weeks after Sept. 11, The Times dispatched her abroad, first to Russia and then to Iran. She had only just arrived in Iran when word came in that the Taliban had fled western Afghanistan. Ms. Waldman crossed the border on foot with the Times’s Persian translator and their wheely suitcases, while the Afghan guards stared. She spent the better part of that year reporting on post-Taliban Afghanistan, initially from Herat and later from Kandahar. A year later, she was transplanted to the Times’s South Asia bureau in New Delhi, reporting from across the region, and making more trips to Afghanistan, as the United States began the war in Iraq.

Given Ms. Waldman’s journalistic background, it’s notable that in The Submission it is the journalist character, Alyssa Spier, an amoral reporter from the New York Post, who plays perhaps the least forgivable role in the controversy over the memorial in the novel. “The only part that veered a bit into satire was the portrayal of the Post,” wrote Mr. Keller in his email to The Observer. “I mean, the idea that the Post would twist the truth, invade people’s privacy, sensationalize, even make things up, all in service of a grotesque hate campaign … I found that a little much.” Alyssa, for her part, is uninterested in the “stodgy, mincing version of news” in the “blue-blood papers.”

When asked if Alyssa was a projection of some of her own fears about the strategies of her sometime profession, Ms. Waldman mentioned Janet Malcolm’s theories of journalistic manipulation, then added: “There’s a lot of self-justification or rationalization when you are calling people up and saying, ‘What is it like to lose your husband?’ I know there’s all kinds of reasons for doing that but there was something that I was not suited for.” After covering the 2005 tsunami in Indonesia, Ms. Waldman returned to the States, leaving The Times for the more liberal word counts of The Atlantic.

“I think after the tsunami, where it was the exact same thing of going to village after village and asking what it’s like to lose your husband and four children … I just felt like it wasn’t for me anymore,” she said. “I think I also had some burnout—I came back after almost four years book-ended by 9/11 on one side and the tsunami in 2005 on the other. After that I kind of thought, ‘I don’t think I want to do this anymore.’”

She also had the seeds of the novel already germinating in her mind.

She’d first thought of the idea in 2003 after the contest to design the memorial was announced and she encouraged an artist friend to apply.

“I was saying to her, ‘Why don’t you enter the 9/11 memorial competition?’” she remembered. “We were talking and sort of got into Maya Lin and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the backlash against her because she was Asian-American.”

Ms. Waldman began writing the novel while on a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard (during which she had proposed to write “a nonfiction work on the social and intellectual history of Muslims in modern Great Britain”). Her early forays were tentative, but when she had an initial mash-up of scenes she began shopping for agents. Bill Clegg, whom Ms. Waldman eventually chose, suggested she consolidate the work into a full chapter with an outline.

“Amy tortured me for at least three or four breakfasts—giving me a little chunk of new material every month or so and I gladly kept auditioning to play the part of her agent,” wrote Mr. Clegg in an email.

Ms. Waldman sold the book based on 80 pages and the outline, a small excerpt for a first-time author, but, according to Mr. Clegg, “nearly all editors were interested.”

“Rarely are pages as strong as Amy’s were when we sent them to publishers,” he added. Ms. Waldman eventually went with Courtney Hodell at FSG. By the time she turned in the first draft of the manuscript, in February 2010, the book was 800 pages (Ms. Hodell called it “Thomas Mann-ish”). It was while in the process of revising her manuscript down to its current 299 pages (and expecting twins with her husband, Alex Star, senior editor of the Times’s Sunday Book Review) that the controversy erupted over the project now known as the “Ground Zero mosque.” Ms. Waldman had read a story in The Times about the project in late 2009 but said that it initially “barely registered.” In May 2010, however, when the story suddenly flared up on cable news, Ms. Waldman went to a community board meeting and left taken aback by the vitriol she had witnessed (and its eerie similarity to her book).

“It just came out of nowhere and it was packed,” she remembered. “People were so angry and I kind of couldn’t believe it. There were people who were genuinely opposed, who were very sympathetic, and then there was some real ugliness there that was pretty shocking to me.” Not to mention the similarities to her book. “It was very surreal,” she said—so much so that she ultimately changed some parts of the book that were too similar to the rhetoric around the mosque. “I didn’t want it to just read exactly like it read in the newspaper,” she said.

Some of the sharpest barbs in the book, however, are reserved not for conservative bigotry but liberal hypocrisy. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are for the most part referenced only obliquely, and the position of her former employer in supporting them is glossed over. But it is one character’s helpless explanation of her decision to come out against the Muslim designer of the mosque that stings: “The New Yorker didn’t trust him!” cries the character in her own defense. “What was I supposed to do?”

In the interview, Ms. Waldman treads carefully on the subject of the war. “I think even something like in the run-up to the Iraq war, for example,” she ventured, “where there were so many liberals who have now said ‘I really regret that’ but were somehow shaped by this climate of fear and this sense that anything is justified … I think the book is definitely something of an exploration of some of those emotions but just through how people feel about Mo Khan: they don’t know how to read him and how to read the garden—what do we do when we don’t know?”

Ms. Waldman is adamant that the world she created in her book—where grief is exploited to gain rhetorical advantage and reason is sacrificed for political ambition—exists separately from the world she once reported on at The Times. In her determination to place the book in a purely fictional realm (and assert again that it was not her intention to write a 9/11 novel), Ms. Waldman initially even resisted the release date of the book being as close as it is to the 10-year anniversary of the attacks (FSG furnished her with an office to make sure she finished in time). She also wanted to strike any reference to Sept. 11 on the book jacket.

None of the characters are based on anybody real, she insists, any resemblance is purely coincidental.

ewitt@observer.com

"To stand at Church and Vesey streets," Cuozzo says, "is to witness a new Downtown being born."

After nearly a decade of false starts, delays, and general confusion, the city is finally beginning to see the emerging outline of the new World Trade Center. Cuozzo writes a quick rundown on the status of each project, and even manages to be positive--or at least restrained--about plans he previously criticized, saying that it's "too late to turn back" on the Transportation Hub (though he also calls the project "tortured"), and concedes that the surrounding trees soften the memorial's effect.

Cuozzo also spoke to critics who believe that the scope of the real estate project exceeds the demand for the space in a city that currently has a commercial vacancy rate of more than 10 percent. Following this logic, he argues, the Twin Towers should never have been built, as they took decades to fill. Of course, he also says that detractors are either jealous, defeatist or Twin Towers fanatics "for whom only restoration of the banal hulks would do."

From a real estate perspective, Cuozzo's argument makes sense. For the past several years, "Ground Zero" has described the rubble on which the Twin Towers once stood-and the site of impotent development plans, delays, and indecision. He seems to believe that with the area's reconstruction, the term will no longer apply to the location. It will refer to a prior state of flux in which we were still dealing with the tragedy of September 11 in some form or function. Since the project finally appears to be on track, we should let "Ground Zero" go.

For more general purposes, however, we would be doing the victims of September 11 a disservice in retiring the phrase. Developing projects may stand on the site, but the memory of what occurred there less than a decade ago remains. It is the only 9/11-specific phrase that applies to the location: "World Trade Center" described it before the tragedy, and will apply to the new buildings going forward. "Ground Zero" is the term that allows us to preserve, in daily language, the legacy of those who died.

Despite the site's reconstruction and bin Laden's death, 9/11 is still a source of grief for many; and the terrorist group that masterminded it, though reduced, still poses a threat to our country. The last people who truly occupied the site were those who were injured, killed, or in serious danger during the terrorist attack. The term ground Zero, though obsolete in terms of physical real estate, recalls a tragedy that is still too fresh to leave behind

realestate@observer.com

Last night, for instance, a harmless question The Brooklyn Paper at a minor league baseball game somehow yielded this response:

"I remember I came here the Friday before 9-11," Giuliani said in response to a simple question about which team he would be rooting for in the game between the [Brooklyn] Cyclones or the Staten Island Yankees. "There was a beautiful view of the World Trade Center - there was a nice view of the towers from Staten Island's ballpark, too."

Earlier this month, he told Matt Lauer that he was opposed to the mosque two blocks from ground zero, and spoke on behalf of the 9/11 vicitms' families, "who I happen to know and have gotten to know really well."

In his nearly 24 years as president of the powerful Real Estate Board of New York, Steven Spinola has rarely seen his members so riled up. "They're saying to me, 'You've got to stop this, you can't let it happen.'"

The commotion: the Obama administration's plan to hold its 9/11 terror trial in the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan.

Pleading with any and every elected and government official with potential influence on the issue, including those in the White House, major landlords and other real estate moguls are scrambling to find a different trial venue. They warn that one downtown, with its security threats and streets closures, will turn Lower Manhattan into a commercial kind of no man's land, not unlike the months after 9/11.

The business community's battle, led by Mr. Spinola and Bill Rudin, the landlord and Association for a Better New York chairman, appears an uphill one. Thus far, the biggest New York political names with potential influence on the matter have resisted criticizing Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to hold the trial downtown. Mayor Bloomberg and the state's two U.S. senators have instead been focused on getting the federal government to pick up the tab, staying mostly mum, publicly, on the venue.

Mr. Spinola, no stranger to persistence, is energized.

He said he has approached three Obama administration officials about the issue since the trial location was announced, urging other locations, including Governors Island. At separate meetings and events unrelated to the trial, Mr. Spinola raised the issue with Jim Messina, deputy White House chief of staff (who said the decision rested with the Department of Justice, according to multiple attendees); Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano; and White House political adviser David Axelrod.

Mr. Spinola, Mr. Rudin and others have also barraged local elected officials, including members of Congress, with hopes that enough pressure will cause the Justice Department to find a new location. There is a strong, more public resistance from residents and small-business owners to hosting the trial. The community board has had numerous meetings on the topic, and residents have been vocal in pushing alternatives and engaging support from local elected officials.

"I think that there is a community of interest forming," said Mary Ann Tighe, the chairwoman of REBNY who has been active on the issue as well. "The unintended consequence of-I'm sure-a well-intentioned thought is something that could be devastating for downtown."

THE TRIAL OF Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other alleged conspirators has no set start date, but, upon its commencement, the NYPD would surround the federal courthouse on Pearl Street with a restricted-access "hard" perimeter, and a larger "soft" perimeter, with far more traffic allowed through.

The message from the business leaders, who have had little trouble wresting incentives for Lower Manhattan over the past eight years, is a simple one: move the trial anywhere else. Its effects, they say, would scare away would-be tenants from Lower Manhattan, cut off foot traffic and tourism and add another hurdle to downtown's recovery amid a recession.

Some of the apocalyptic cries can probably be chalked up to hysterics. The soft perimeter will indeed allow traffic through, with periodic searches, and the area mostly encompasses government-occupied buildings, the tenants for which aren't going anywhere.

Still, the disruption of traffic is a concern, as is the stigma for the larger area. Even with a complex $200 million annual security plan in place, Lower Manhattan would newly become a likely terrorism target once again. And the added perception to come that Lower Manhattan is a checkerboard of closed-off streets and security zones would only make it that much harder to attract businesses and employers.

The larger area south of Canal Street is struggling to find its footing, to be sure, and it's easy to see how another obstacle would be unwelcome. While the boom market through 2007 brought a new, diverse array of office tenants and conversions of old buildings to residential condos, the challenges going forward are immense. Between just Goldman Sachs moving into its new building and Bank of America consolidating its Merrill Lynch offices, there are millions of square feet of office space expected to go vacant within the next three years. And with office rents dropping in midtown comparatively faster, Lower Manhattan offers less of an economic edge for would-be tenants.

"Why would you throw this into the mix?" said Liz Berger, president of the Downtown Alliance, a business group that opposes the trial in Lower Manhattan. "It doesn't make sense generally to put this kind of trial in an area of such density."

THE TRIAL MUST be held in the Southern District of New York, which includes Manhattan and northern suburban counties, and there are certainly no other locations that have a precedent for hosting such a high-profile trial. A spokesman for the Justice Department, Dean Boyd, said in a statement that the department would "work closely with local officials to minimize disruptions to the community."

"Our federal courts have a long history of safely and securely handling international terrorism cases, and no district has a longer history than the Southern District of New York in Manhattan," he said in the statement.

A set of local elected officials, including Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, has warmed to the concept of moving the trial to Governors Island, and they are urging at least a careful look elsewhere in the Southern District. "Obviously, I think that Lower Manhattan is not the place for it," said Representative Jerry Nadler. (A spokesman later clarified Mr. Nadler believes Lower Manhattan is "not the only place" for the trial, as alternatives should be examined). "I think we should take a look at all other possible venues in the Southern District."

Some of the most influential notables have yet to publicly stake a position on moving the trial. Mayor Bloomberg has said little either way, other than to push the federal government to pay for the security. The same goes for Senator Charles Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, whose spokesman said that while she "is open to ideas" about mitigation from the business community, her main concern is shifting the cost to the federal government.

So if not in Lower Manhattan, where could the trial go?

The business elites are pointing their fingers toward anywhere else, suggesting a number of locations upstate.

Julie Menin, chairwoman of downtown's Community Board 1, is pushing four potential sites, urging officials to evaluate them: a federal prison facility in Otisville; West Point; Stewart Air National Guard base in Newburgh; and the federal courthouse in White Plains. Ms. Menin has also urged Governors Island, an idea that was briefly entertained by the NYPD before it rejected it last week as impractical.

Mr. Bloomberg was less diplomatic in his dismissal. Speaking to the local weekly Downtown Express, he called it "one of the dumber ideas" he's ever heard.

ebrown@observer.com

The Obama administration has decided to bring Mohammed to New York to stand trial, a move that many New Yorkers, including Governor Paterson and former mayor Rudolph Giuliani, have criticized. The governor believes that the trial will pose an “encumbrance” on New Yorkers; Mr. Giuliani said that the suspect ought to be tried by a military tribunal because his crime was an act of war.

Mr. Giuliani surely echoes the sentiments of many New Yorkers who believe that Mr. Mohammed’s barbarity deserves summary justice, not the legalistic procedures that civilized nations use to protect the rights of the innocent and the guilty. Mr. Paterson is right to say that Mr. Mohammed’s very presence in a city he sought to destroy is revolting.

Nevertheless, as New Yorkers, as Americans, as advocates for universal rights and self-evident truths, we must proceed in the spirit of those values that we preach to others. We may resent Mr. Mohammed’s presence in a courtroom in our city. We may loathe the rights we will afford him as a defendant. We may despise anything he might say, or any argument his lawyer might make.

But we cannot give into those thoughts, for we are better than that. Indeed, we are better than those who seek our destruction. Their actions speak for themselves and their values. So do ours. We will allow Khalid Shaikh Mohammed his day in court. We will protect him. We will hear from him. And a small group of us—the jurors—will decide his fate dispassionately and in accordance with the rules of a civilized, tolerant nation.

That is how we do things here.

When did fearmongering in a time of war become an act of patriotism?

Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try Al Qaeda strategist Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other residents of the Guantánamo prison in American civilian courts has provoked angry criticism from all the usual sources, from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to the Fox News airwaves. While some of the complaints are thoughtful, many are nothing more than demagogic appeals that seek to undermine the foundations of justice in a democratic society.

When Mr. Holder’s critics say that Mr. Mohammed doesn’t “deserve” an open and adversarial trial, they are misunderstanding the spirit of our laws. The right to a trial—indeed, all the rights afforded to criminal defendants under the Constitution—is not apportioned according to what the defendants supposedly deserve. What they deserve is, in fact, precisely what a fair trial is designed to determine.

The nation’s founders despised the passions of the lynch mob and the arbitrary penalties handed down by kings and despots. They were particularly appalled by the tortures and abuse inflicted on American Revolutionary soldiers by the British oppressor—and vowed never to do the same to America’s enemies.

When Mr. Holder’s critics say that we don’t dare try a criminal like Mr. Mohammed on the soil of the United States, in a New York City federal courthouse, that is a terrible concession to the terrorists. The same is true when those critics protest against incarcerating a figure such as Mr. Mohammed in an American prison, rather than Gitmo. Essentially, those arguments exaggerate the power of Al Qaeda—which conservatives usually claim has been profoundly weakened over the past several years—and underestimates the strength of the American justice system.

In fact, we have been trying dangerous terrorists in American courts for many years, and then incarcerating them in American prisons. According to a new study by the Center for Law and Security at New York University, the U.S. government has indicted 828 defendants on terrorism-related charges since 2001. Of those indictments, trials are still pending against 235 defendants—and of the remaining 539 defendants, 523 were convicted either at trial or via plea. The single largest venue for terrorism trials is New York City, where 145 terrorism indictments have been filed. The center found in a previous study that the conviction rate in New York is higher than in the rest of the nation, and that sentencing in New York is also tougher. That is understandable—and may help to explain why the attorney general chose the Southern District of New York for the Mohammed prosecution. In the city’s federal courts, the conviction rate of individuals charged with terrorism involving a U.S. target is 100 percent.

When Mr. Mohammed is convicted (or pleads guilty, as he has previously said he will do), the U.S. federal prison system is ideally suited to inflict suitable punishment on him and his cohort. Better than providing him with martyrdom via execution, he should be buried in a “Supermax” prison, from which nobody has ever escaped, and left to rot.

The most basic challenge of the terror campaign waged by jihadi extremists is to preserve the differences between us and them—a challenge that the American government has failed at in far too many instances over the past eight years, through the use of torture, extrajudicial detentions, renditions to other countries and various other violations of U.S. law and treaty obligations. Our own courts found that these acts by the previous administration were lawless and required them to be reversed.

As a nation, we should have the confidence to make the case against these murderers according to our laws and Constitution, without fear of their propaganda or violence. Every precaution should be taken to protect national security and public safety—and then our system will prevail over their perverse ideology.

jconason@observer.com

But 27-year-old arts administrator Daisy Rosario of Harlem pressed a blue Obama poster over her mouth and tried not to cry.

"The last eight years have been awful," she said. "On September 11, I was in the first tower that got hit. Since then," she went on, referring to the Bush years, "it's been a long, sad journey." 

She added, "I just want it to be over."