EDITORIAL : THE NEW YORK TIMES, USA

Cowardice Blocks the 9/11 Trial

Last year, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. described a federal court trial for the self-professed mastermind of Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, as “the defining event of my time as attorney general.” On Monday, Mr. Holder’s dream for demonstrating the power of the American court system crumbled when he announced that the trial would take place not in New York City or anywhere in the United States but before a military commission at the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prison camp.

That retreat was a victory for Congressional pandering and an embarrassment for the Obama administration, which failed to stand up to it.
The wound inflicted on New York City from Mr. Mohammed’s plot nearly a decade ago will not heal for many lifetimes, yet the city, while still grieving, has thrived. How fitting it would have been to put the plot’s architect on trial a few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, to force him to submit to the justice of a dozen chosen New Yorkers, to demonstrate to the world that we will not allow fear of terrorism to alter our rule of law.
But, apparently, there are many who continue to cower, who view terrorists as much more fearsome than homegrown American mass murderers and the American civilian jury system as too “soft” to impose needed justice. The administration of George W. Bush encouraged this view for more than seven years, spreading a notion that terror suspects only could be safely held and tried far from our shores at Guantánamo and brought nowhere near an American courthouse. The federal courts have, in fact, convicted hundreds of terrorists since 9/11. And federal prisons safely hold more than 350 of them.
The pandering toward this mentality began as soon as Mr. Holder announced his plan in 2009 to try Mr. Mohammed in Lower Manhattan. A group of senators, including Joseph Lieberman, an independent of Connecticut, complained that it would give terrorists a platform to rally others to their cause. Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, said the trial should be moved elsewhere because New Yorkers didn’t want it, as if prosecutors needed opinion polls to determine where to seek justice.
The final blow came from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who originally accepted the trial but then gave in to downtown business interests that opposed it for reasons of inconvenience. His office promulgated the absurd notion that security would cost $1 billion. Congress then made the trial impossible last year with a measure prohibiting any spending to move prisoners from Guantánamo to the United States.
Mr. Holder was right to sound bitter about the decision at his news conference on Monday. But the Obama administration must shoulder some of the blame. As The New Yorker reported last year, it did little to prepare the political groundwork for a local trial and barely defended the idea after the unfounded attacks began.
Given the circumstances, Mr. Holder is right to push for a military trial for Mr. Mohammed, rather than let him linger in indefinite limbo. His decision will test whether reforms to the military commission system will allow for both a fair prosecution and a vigorous defense. But Monday’s announcement represents a huge missed opportunity to prove the fairness of the federal court system and restore the nation’s reputation for providing justice for all.

Union-Bashing, Now in Ohio

This is Ohio’s new concept of how to deal fairly with its public employees: Make them an offer, and if they don’t accept it, impose it anyway. There will be no appeal or arbitration. And unions will no longer be able to negotiate their health-care benefits or require the payment of dues from members.

The bill containing these provisions was signed into law last week by Gov. John Kasich, another of the Republicans who has misinterpreted his election last year as a mandate to try to demolish union rights.
The best-known fight over public unions was in Wisconsin, where a law ending their collective-bargaining rights has been temporarily stopped by a court order. But, as Steven Greenhouse reported in The Times, the Ohio law is actually much tougher.
It cuts the negotiating rights of police officers and firefighters, not just non-uniformed employees, and it allows cities and school boards to simply impose their final bargaining offer on workers if they cannot reach a negotiated agreement. Under those circumstances, it is hard to imagine why any city would even bother negotiating, and that, in fact, seems to be the point.
With the efficiency of a bulldozer, similar bills are now being proposed or enacted in nearly a dozen states. In Oklahoma, a State Senate committee has approved a bill to remove the collective-bargaining rights for workers in the state’s 13 largest cities. In Florida, where collective bargaining is protected by the State Constitution, lawmakers are pushing through bills that would limit unions’ ability to collect dues and make political contributions.
In Maine, where Gov. Paul LePage was so contemptuous of labor that he ordered the removal of murals depicting workers from a state building, Republicans are even supporting a loosening of child labor restrictions, eliminating the maximum number of hours that minors can work on school days.
Supporters of these measures say they are acting out of concern for their state’s budget. There is little doubt that the real goal is to weaken unions and their ability to back Democratic candidates. The Associated Press reported that a Florida legislative analysis found the bills would have virtually no impact on state and local budgets. But it said they would be effective in one regard: making unions “likely to have more difficulty collecting dues and funds from employees for political purposes.”
The sponsors of these measures seem to think that with no reason to negotiate and no ability to raise funds, public-sector unions would simply fade away. As much as the unions may struggle with these new shackles, their members — and their motivation — are not going away.
There are already active recall petitions for Republican legislators in Wisconsin, and Ohio unionists are gearing up for a referendum to overturn their state’s new law. Democratic organizers are finding voters in middle-class districts aghast at the damage to economic rights caused by the new crop of Republicans. It may turn out that the best way to revive the ailing labor movement is by trying to chop it down. 

The Dollars and Cents of Bats and Farming

Putting a dollar value on nature and the services it provides isn’t easy. Such numbers can show how much our human economy depends on nature’s indiscernible economy. Take bats. A study in Science magazine reveals just how important they are to American agriculture.

Every day, a bat eats much of its body weight in insects, many of them harmful to crops. A group of scientists led by Thomas Kunz at Boston University calculated how much more money cotton farmers in one region of Texas would spend on pesticides if bats weren’t present. Extrapolating from those numbers, they estimated that bats save American farmers somewhere between $3.7 billion and $54 billion a year, most likely about $22.9 billion.

This is a huge savings no one notices as long as bats flourish. But bat populations are severely threatened, especially the commonest species, the little brown bat, which is being decimated by a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome. The disease has spread all across the eastern half of the country and is now moving westward from Oklahoma.

In 2010, Interior Department agencies spent $6.3 million researching and trying to prevent the spread of white-nose syndrome. That money was taken from other programs, and it was barely a start. What’s needed now is financing specifically allocated to staff continuous bat research. The Interior Department should not have to borrow from itself to protect these creatures that are so important to American agriculture. We know all of the talk in Washington these days is about cutting, but spending a little more now could save us a fortune later.

OMG!!! OED!!! LOL!!!!!

It’s wonderful to experience the ongoing corruption and evolution of the English language. Last month, OMG and LOL were inducted into the Oxford English Dictionary, along with the heart symbol — the first time a meaning enters our most exalted linguistic inventory via the T-shirt and bumper sticker.

They follow in the steps of other representatives of our electronic age. Google is there. So are dotcom and wiki. Chances are the meaning of tweet will soon spill out of its ornithological domain. The additions bring to mind the words of William Safire, The Times’s former master wordsmith, who climbed down from the conservative ramparts in the culture wars 25 years ago to accept that “words come to mean what most people think they mean, not what we say they ought to mean.”

The embrace of the parlance of the Internet by the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED, is not just affirmation of the plasticity of the English language. A century ago, Chesterton berated the belief that language was complete, with “a word for every reality in earth, or heaven, or hell.” LOL, prosaic little acronym, conjures this boundlessness.

In “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges tells the tale of a 17th-century polymath who builds a language to organize all human ideas, “where the name of each thing says all the details of its destiny, past and future.” As the decimal system allowed people to write any number in the universe, Wilkins offered his code to produce every possible meaning. Yet Wilkins’s lexicon could never encompass the universe, which Borges suspected, in its organic, unifying sense, cannot exist. Borges’s universe didn’t have the Internet as we know it. He may have called it a library.