Twice recently, we have heard of by Al Qaeda’s planned attacks upon our commuter aircraft.  These threats have meet with nothing but perfunctory rhetoric from our Department of Homeland Security.  The enemy seems to know more about our security operations than those allegedly in charge of them.  The media, whose sense of responsibility I have seriously questioned for at least a decade, reports that our security force possesses a list of suspected terrorists numbering as high as 500,000.  Five will get you ten that if the government spoon-fed this figure to the media, it is must be twice as high as that, if not more.

Meanwhile, thousands of illegal aliens have already crossed the Mexican-American border, and guess what?  They aren’t headed to Acapulco for a little R&R.  They are infiltrating the United States and placing additional burdens upon our already groaning economy.  Just this week we learned that easily accessible technology — cell phones — now enable the unlawful “visitors” to pinpoint sources of potable water across our border, thereby accelerating the mass exodus out of their country and into ours.

I don’t know about you, but these numbers sound like an armies to me. Why have we not profiled potential terrorists?  Why have we not deterred the marauding aliens more productively?  Who’s minding our store?  Apparently, no one!  If this is a barometer of the efficacy of our national security, we are in deep doggie-do!

There is absolutely no excuse for allowing terrorists to board any manner of conveyance, at home or abroad, for the sole purpose of murdering innocent people.  In possession of advanced technology and so many names, we can profile passengers with ease!  And if we instituted more stringent controls at the border, we could put the kibosh on illegals claiming jobs and benefiting financially from our social programs without having to pay into them.

The truth of the matter is we have a homeland security in name only.  The present administration is so involved in pushing its healthcare reform through to approval that it can’t see the forest for the trees.  It can’t prioritize the needs and rights of our citizenry.

What are the CIA, the FBI, and Homeland Security doing to secure our transportation system against terrorist attacks?  Must another tragedy like 9/11 befall us before they take action?   Some time ago, we lost thirteen good people at Ford Hood at the hands of an Islamic zealot whose twisted mindset was not only known but also documented in his formal military records.  Two gatecrashers appeared recently at a White House fete, slipping like butter past security and potentially jeopardizing the safety of our President and First Lady.  Mere days after Christmas, two of our airplanes were in serious threat of attack by suicide bombers.  All of this could have been avoided had the suspects in question been profiled.

Had the terrorists succeeded, the dirty bastards would be dancing in the streets in Yemen and toasting Osama Bin Ladin in the rat-holes of Afghanistan.

If these incidents don’t constitute a wake up call, I guess we will just have to wait for the Big One before government moves its lazy, red tape-lovin’ behind. 

When the twisted fiends felled the Twin Towers on 9/11, Internet chatter as well as direct messages seeping like toxic waste out of terrorist camps indicated that they’d accomplished more than they’d hoped for (they had not expected the total obliteration of both structures).  In their wildest and sickest dreams, the terrorists could not have anticipated  the fallout from the blackest day on American soil.

This fallout runs deeper than the subsequent crisis on Wall Street, our military’s hunt for Bin Laden in his rat holes, escalation of our forces in Iraq, and the current recession.  For the love of God — and if you don’t love God, then for the love of our country — please read my last statement again, carefully.  Let it go through you like slow ice.  What could possibly be worse than any or all of that?  The dismantling of our tenets underpinning our Constitution is the absolute worst that can happen — and it’s been happening, because in our fear and anger and apathy, we have allowed it to happen.

Viewed impartially, the Constitution is nothing more and nothing less than a soul pact.  It’s the pact that our forefathers made with each other, and with all future generations born upon this soil, and those immigrating to this soil to take the oath of citizenry.  It is an agreement that all men, women, and children are born into this world via something greater than themselves, with unalienable rights bestowed upon them by that God.  God is and must remain an essential part of our national equation because without a higher authority, to whom are we accountable as a nation?  And we must be accountable as a nation, to ourselves and to the Constitution.

The treatment of confirmed and self-proclaimed terrorists in Gitmo Bay, the Federal edict to try the terrorists in civil rather than military courts, the potentiality of a national healthcare system, jobs going overseas, corporate scum bailed out to the tune of billions on the blood, sweat, and tears of private citizens, the war in Iraq — all of this has plunged us into a socio-political and economic crisis more intense and even more trying that what we had endured in the ’60s’s — and that’s saying a lot. Our President’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize with one hand while escalating the war in Afghanistan with the other should not have stunned anyone.  It is perhaps the most glaring example of how torn our nation has become.

No matter the winds that buffet us at home and from abroad, we must hold tight to our freedoms as citizens, and honor — not just give lip service to — the principles upon which the Constitution is based.   There must be no double standards here, and since there are, we must work to rectify them.  The world still watches and waits to see what America does; what will we show them?

We will show them what we are made of.  We will show them what has kept us intact and what has strengthened us thus far.  This is not the first time that we’ve been tossed upon the churning waters of national flux; not the first time that our envelope was pushed to its limits.

Blood ran in our streets in the 1960’s, and for too long (even one day is too long).  Entire families were forever fractured over the long bloody war in Vietnam.  Women emerged as an inarguable and permanent factor in the work force.  Men walked on the moon for the first time in history.  Eastern theosophy rose slowly on America’s shores, illuminating the Golden Rule, as God knows, we needed illumination.  Three of our best and bravest were cut down before our eyes: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., President Jack Kennedy, and his brother, U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy.  They did not die in vain but rather, inspired and instituted legislation that solidified the canons stated in our Constitution, far beyond mere rhetoric. These three men and those who supported them strengthened the reality behind the concept that we are all of us in this together (“E pluribus Unum”: “Out of many, One”).

Like those who tossed the tea into the Boston Harbor more than two centuries ago, and those who marched on Washington and through local streets forty-plus years ago, you must exercise your rights under the Constitution in order to keep that Constitution alive.   If something troubles you — an elected leader, a corrupt or inhuman and inhumane organization –  speak out.  Now is not the time for burying your head in the sand; nor is it the time for indulging in self-pity.  And nothing that impacted the common good was ever gained through silence and indifference. Much, however, was gained through peaceful organization, the raising of communal voices, unmitigated pressure upon our elected leaders, and the passage of true and lasting change.

Friday the 13th arrived, living up to its reputation.  Yesterday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the man proudly calling himself the mastermind behind 9/11 will be tried not in a military trial, but in a civilian federal court in downtown Manhattan (New York City, for those of you not from the Big Apple).  Holder’s decision dovetails with President Obama’s plan to slam the doors on Gitmo, both literally and as an uncomfortable chapter in U.S. history that the President would rather have gone unwritten.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to face trial in New York City rather than at the hands of the military; one of his cohorts, Ahmed Ghailani, claims that distinction.  However, the administration chose, at the time of Ghailani’s trial, not to seek the death penalty.  One wonders, then, what is to become of the man who alleges to have pitched his evil plan to Osama Bin Laden, negotiated funding from the rebel Afghani leader, trained the assassins, and then blessed the systematic extinction of more than 3,000 innocent American lives.

The ramifications of Holder’s decision are both widespread and complex, and if you are interested in those legalities, start surfing the web.  I am not an attorney or a politician.  I am but a New Yorker whose city has been irrevocably altered by a handful of madmen.

If Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is to attain a fair trial, as is his right under Constitutional Law, will he receive one?  The prosecution will have to journey to a mountain in Tibet to locate a single New Yorker yet to hear of and/or unaffected by the horror and tragedy of 9/11; New Yorkers, of course, do not live in Tibet.  But even if juror objectivity can be established, how can those jurors possibly be Mohammed’s peers, when his peers, by his own admission, are terrorists?

In the days shortly following 9/11, when the Bush administration linked Bin Laden to the fallen Towers and the 3,000-plus cold-blooded murders, I had thoughts of what I’d like to see happen to the terrorists.  At first, I thought it might be fitting to roast Bin Laden and his cronies over the still-smoking embers of Ground Zero; I meant this literally.  I added to this fantasy by envisioning the loved ones of those killed taking a pound of flesh, again literally, from the bastards.  One pound at time, strategically incised, would not kill them outright and would surely not kill them immediately.  They would have died a slow, torturous death. I thought this a fitting end for the filthy lot of them.  With the full knowledge that such fantasies might call bad karma to befall me, I maintained them nonetheless, struggling with my morals as a Christian and with my civic duty as a native New Yorker.

A part of me would still like to see Mohammed and his cohorts let loose into the streets of my city.  If the faint-hearted are afraid to venture there, imagine how the terrorists might feel, facing a righteously enraged mob unrestricted in addressing those who plotted for five years (according to Mohammed) to annihilate their loved ones. And some part of me would dearly love to see these proceedings televised.

The other part of me says that the dirty bastard deserves a fair trial, for that is the only way to preserve what the terrorists sought so hard to destroy and what they still seek to obliterate.   Our justice system only works if it works for all, terrorists or not.  To deny the self-proclaimed architect of 9/11 a fair trial is to negate the tenets underpinning our Constitution.  And the toppling of the Constitution was their ultimate objective, not merely the felling of two mighty skyscrapers and their occupants.

Having said that, I hope the bastards do get the death penalty once they are tried as fairly as we can manage within our system.  And I hope that the executions are televised, to send a small message to every other anti-American murderer, including terrorists-in-the-making.

In the words of Jesus Christ, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.  And render unto God what is God’s.”   The execution of Mohammed and his followers for their crimes of terrorism would kill both of those birds with a single stone.