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Hello and welcome to this late political GabFest for the 20th of November. I'm John Dickerson

in Washington with David Plotz. Emily Bazelon is in New Haven. Welcome to all of you. Today we're

going to talk about the president and specifically his Attorney General's decision to try five

terrorists in New York.

Then we're going to talk about mammograms and the conflicting advice on when to get examined.

And then we're going to finish with Sarah Palin, which I know makes many of our listeners jump with a delight.

But we will talk about her and her best-selling book.

Are you on speed?

Your voice is getting, his voice is just

so fast in these introductions. You think? I just feel like, I feel like people don't really want to

hear, you know, they want to get to the first topic. Okay. So, which is going to be,

Emily, Eric Holder, the Attorney General has decided to try five terrorists in New York City. Good

decision, bad decision. Excellent decision. The problematic

part of this is there are some other terrorists who are not being tried in New York City. In fact,

we do not know what is happening to them. And that is the more daunting part of the government's next move.

But wait, let's go back to the actual decision. We do the ones who are being tried. Come on.

Okay, fine. Talk about moving fast. Okay, so here's this question that gets brought up a lot, which is if these guys were still on the battlefield, we could blow them to smithereens. Actually, we could even, like, control a plane by remote control and kill them. And when they wouldn't get due process and it would be just fine. So why do we have to give them, why do we have to go through the legal system? Why do we feel bound to do that when in the course of war we wouldn't? And also, I think there's a second part to that, John, which is actually not only could we blow them to smithereens, but also as a lot of conservatives are saying, if you are captured on the battlefield, as you can argue that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was in some sense captured on the battlefield, if you consider the battlefield to be an apartment.

But that people we capture on the battlefield, we do not give criminal trials to with full American due process, that we treat them in some other way, prisoners of war, we exchange them at the end of a war, we do some kind of military trial for them, and that at least as the conservative critics say, it is odd and unprecedented to give them full American justice in this form. Now, Emily, take that apart.

I feel like I'm now taking a two-part exam and, of course, called the law of war.

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