Any minimally decent person would want to see Randall Terry taken out of action, and I didn't expect any other answer from you, Tom.

Your response helps illustrate the tangle we get ourselve into with murky terminology like "terrorist". bin Terry and Operation al Rescue are easily recognizable as terrorists, yet US citizenship somehow modifies that label. "Our terrorists" are different somehow from "those terrorists". But isn't that an artificial distinction? Would 9/11 have been any more acceptable if the hijackers had been US citizens?

"Terrorist" is too imprecise a term, leading to the phrase "war on terror" which strikes me as conveying no useful information. It's a tossup whether a purely legal or purely military response is appropriate. We give lip service to saying we're engaged in a new kind of war, yet we pick our responses from the same old menu: Military or legal, pick only one.

If we label the challenge "a global insurgency", I think we're closer to a real understanding. That view leads me to conclude that the proper response is a new response, a blend of military and legal techniques.

Consider that in a classic military operation, your enemy moves in a "jurisdiction" where you have carte blanche to act: The battlefield. But a global insurgent travels to the fight passing through many jurisdictions and crosses many borders. Unless you think you can station US troops at every customs portal in the world, and in a line across every border, it's obvious that you have to address the movement of insurgents using existing institutions and legal structures.

Then there's the financial aspect. Do you choke off the insurgency's funds by bombing every bank in the world where they might have an account? Or do you work within the legal framework of the international banking system?

Our initial response to the problem of guarding air transport was to station troops in every airport. That got old real quick, and in part I think we began to feel a little foolish doing something so obviously impotent to address the problem. So eventually we returned to the legal tradition and set up the TSA, very much a police rather than a military institution.

I wouldn't disparage legal solutions, because they have a singular advantage over military solutions in this kind of war: A definite outcome. Just killing bin Laden would be better than nothing, but then his body is just one among many, albeit a very high-value trophy corpse. The killing likely would have happened away from the cameras, and all we get is the satisfaction of saying "yeah, we offed him, check out this bag of meat we collected from the crater. We swear from the dental records that this really is Osama bin Laden". "And in other news..."

But capture him and bring him to trial, and in front of the whole world we get to look our enemy in the eye and say clearly "you lose". We have more than a corpse, we have the villain in a cage; we're clearly his masters now, and clearly covered in more honor than we'd get just blowing him up by remote control with a Predator. We don't create a martyr, we show off a wretched dog on a leash. We get to remind the world of what he did to us and why we're fighting, and the capture of Osama bin Laden becomes a clear and definite victory.

It's not enough to win an endless series of battles. We need to win the war itself.