I hope he’s mistaken, but I fear he isn’t.

At SteynOnline we no longer observe the 9/11 anniversary, for reasons I outlined last year:

The war is lost, at home and abroad. On the domestic front, we doubled the rate of Muslim immigration to the west and began assimilating ourselves with Islam’s strictures on freedom of expression and the like. The decade-and-a-half since the Danish Mohammed cartoons has been one long remorseless surrender on core western liberties. When a school teacher gets beheaded in the street, there is no outrage at the act, just a mild regret that he should have been foolish enough to provoke his own fate. Even the milder jests from the immediate post-9/11 era – the cartoon of the woman trying on new burqas in the changing room and wondering, ‘Does my bomb look big in this?’ – would not be published today:

In the broader society, our rulers quickly determined that it was easier to punish us than our enemies. The post-9/11 security state surely helped soften up western populations for the ChiCom-19 lockdowns, in which entire nations have been reduced to TSA-administered airports.

As for the war overseas, it ended with a military that can do everything except win handing the keys to Afghanistan back to the guys who pulled off 9/11 – and apologizing for the two-decade inconvenience by gifting the mullahs with some of the most expensive infrastructure on the planet plus an air force, approximately five assault rifles for every Taliban fighter, and express check-in for the forty-seven per cent of the Afghan population that apparently served as US translators.

I thought I could not despise the men who brought us to this pretty pass any more than I do. But here ya go:

CBS News has confirmed military prosecutors and defense attorneys are negotiating potential plea deals that could take the death penalty off the table for the five defendants accused in the 9/11 attacks.

That would be the hairy-backed mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four marginally less hirsute co-conspirators. So, after two decades of leisurely legal jousting back and forth through, this is how it ends. Don’t worry, the plea deals are premised on the quintet being given “substantial sentences” – which one assumes means something less than life without the possibility of parole, else why not say so? In addition, the men will receive “treatment for alleged torture they experienced while in CIA custody“.

Oh, really? How about financial compensation?

Gotta hand it to KSM: He fought the law, and he won. He was captured in Rawalpindi on March 1st 2003, which is nineteen-and-a-half years ago – or twice as long as the First and Second World Wars combined.

If you were about to roll your eyes and sneer “Is there nothing this sclerotic pseudo-republic can do?”, hey, not so fast. Per MSNBC’s finest:

September 11 was a terrorist attack.

January 6 was a terrorist attack…

Both were attacks on America.

And we must seek justice for the latter as we did for the former.

Er, are you sure you got that the right way round? In the time it takes KSM’s lawyers to file a motion of reconsideration of their motion to continue the scheduling conference to schedule the reconsideration of their previous motion to continue, the January 6th “terrorists” have been banged up in solitary, railroaded into copping a plea, and led off to the Big House. It would no longer surprise me if the men who plotted the murder of the 2,977 good souls lost that day were out and strolling the boulevards of Jalalabad long before the 1/6 “insurrectionists” are freed.

Wouldn’t surprise me either, not in the least. But then, why would it? The Left despises us far more than they ever will their unlikely-seeming ally and confrere KSM, whose abiding hatred for America and individual liberty they share, if from a secular, libertine perspective instead of the barbarian-savage pseudo-religion one. And make no mistake, it’s the Left who are in charge here. “Desperate,” “panicked”? Sure, pull the other one, whydon’tcha. It has a bell on it.

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