There is a long and disgraceful tradition of casual support for the IRA by Americans who have no excuse not to know better.

Let me make it quite clear: I am not blaming you personally or any of the people I know on this site and elsewhere in the States about American support for the IRA but it needs to be remembered. Also, one of the first things President Bush did, long before 9/11 was to make it clear that Adams et al were no longer welcome in the White House and the party was over for them. Though I suppose NORAID went on.

I forgot that the Libyan bombing was in 1986. It certainly had the right effect.

As for the legal rigmarole around Lockerbie, you are right, it was a complete mess and there is still a great deal to come out.

And of course the UK has no death penalty. I’m not especially blaming the UK here. As John Bolton pointed out in recent interviews, the US govt foolishly framed the issue as a murder investigation rather than an act of state terrorism. Much of the foolishness that followed might have been prevented if we had treated the attack as what it was. Instead we allowed ourselves to bog down in questions of jurisdiction and evidence. The current controversy about releasing one terrorist is merely the latest act in the farce.

Many Americans were upset about the feting of Gerry Adams, not to mention Arafat. And now we have Zelaya and whoever will come next. I wish we could do better.

I am afraid that during the entire uproar in the States I have been remembering those pictures (have they disappeared from the internet? – I can’t find them) of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinnes standing on the White House front lawn and grinning their heads off, as was President Clinton. How do you think we felt?

But execute prisoners? We can’t have it both ways – if this is a war, then the terrorists are prisoners of war and should be treated thus. If this is a criminal matter, then they should be treated as such. We can’t get away with capturing and trying these people under military rules, then sentencing them under the criminal codes. That would be the same thing as executing every captured Luftwaffe pilot and executing them for murdering British civilians during the bombing raids.

And hunting down and killing the families of terrorists under some theory that they provide moral support, or must be terrorists themselves, or to terrorize the the terrorists? What is that? We want to take the ugliest, furthest beyond the pale aspects of extreme Muslim thinking and adopt it as our own? I don’t think so.

If you are under attack, at some point you have to decide to defeat your attacker or risk worse problems in the future. One problem with not trying to win is that you might encourage more attacks. Another problem is that sooner or later your attacker might score a big enough hit against you to make a strategy of non-response politically untenable for your side. Then a lot more people will get killed.

Such reactions have been human nature – you and yours, we say, out of fear that the same madness may appear in their children who might attack ours. But, most of us push such thoughts back. Still, pushing them back may mean we have lost the ability to distinguish between actors and acts that are terrible (say rape or murder in the enactment of a robbery) and those that are beyond the pale. (Imprisonment and even capital punishment do not seem inappropriate for the former – but what about the latter?)

Do we even still have the concept, beyond the pale? My husband always used it when he was defending – ambivalently – capital punishment. His argument was less that someone deserved it than that society needed it: it needed to define what it would not accept – a person that could no longer live within it, even if in prison. That was in coversations about those terrible sadists any society produces. But terrorists are products of a society that is, itself, beyond the pale, of what we consider civilization. Surely it was the recognition of such truths about Saddam Hussein, a recognition of the dishonesty of Arafat that led to some of the policy decisions in an earlier administration.

Our society seems to recognize no borders; the stakes that define them, many would argue, are in our imagination. They took thousands of years to define and defend – and now, in a couple of generations, they are lost in a fog.

My initial thought when the news broke was that any decent society would have executed the SOB long ago, thus preventing the transnational elite self-aggrandizers from just this kind of antic.

Of course, OTOH, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed still sleeps in a bed so maybe we have no room to throw stones.