Fighting terror

Re “McCain’s terror errors,” Opinion, June 19

Rosa Brooks can’t recognize Barack Obama’s “Sept. 10 mind-set” because she suffers from the same affliction.

Obama, the Supreme Court and Brooks would discard a centuries-old tradition that allows enemy combatants to be detained without trial for the duration of hostilities. This is the real common-sense approach to terrorists -- keeping them off the battlefield so they can’t kill any more of our citizens, at home or abroad. Brooks should have heeded her own advice: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Brooks happily asserts that terrorists subjected to criminal trial are “dismissed by the world as megalomaniacal thugs -- not the kind of guys anyone would want to emulate.” That may be true in her genteel, liberal world. I doubt that many Times employees would sacrifice their jobs, pensions and condos for martyrdom. Unfortunately, plenty of less-enlightened beings around the globe would. Time to wake up.

Bill Ireland

Ontario