America should try terrorists in open court

To the editor:

Your Monday editorial, "Terrorism on trial," was way off the mark.

What did the United Kingdom do with the terrorists who bombed the London Underground? Tried them in open court.

How about Spain, where terrorists bombed trains? Tried them in open court?

What happened to the architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann? He was tried in open court.

The United States is the land of the free and the home of the brave, not the land of the frightened and the home of wimps.

Let the whole world see the best judicial system at work. Try in open court those who helped plan the 9/11 attacks.

Irwin Kaufman

LAS VEGAS

No threat

To the editor:

We hear that President Obama is wrestling with how to handle Afghanistan because the Karzai government is corrupt and inept. How can we stabilize the country?

Wrong question: The question should be, as always: What is in our national interest, as defined chiefly by our national security?

Afghanistan is not a threat to the United States. It may once have given safe haven to al-Qaida, but now they have shifted bases to Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. So the Taliban, which cannot export its war-making power, is no threat to the United States.

In any case, nothing can be achieved, even in the short run, unless we pursue a policy very different from sending 40,000 troops, as Gen. Stanley McChrystal seeks, or more.

We must send enough to push all Afghans -- because we don't know who's Taliban and who isn't -- onto reservations, as our forebears did with our own indigenous inhabitants. Then populate Afghanistan ourselves and declare it a territory of the United States like Puerto Rico is.

Then we should truly have a national security interest in Afghanistan.

Stuart Weiss

LAS VEGAS