WE HAD 'EM: This story -- that a military effort to uncover terrorists had ID'ed Mohammed Atta as a terrorist cell leader well before September 11 but was prevented by military lawyers from passing that info on to the FBI -- strikes me as huge. It's also reassuring, in an odd way. It says that we had these f-ckers, if not for bureaucracy and protocol. Post 9/11, it seems like we're willing to dispense with some of that bureaucracy and protocol, in service of safety. To me, that's what the much-maligned Patriot Act is all about, not to mention Guantanamo. Are the aforementioned a pair of slippery slopes to invasion of privacy and torture? Left unchecked, perhaps. But are they better than leaving Atta alone so that he can pilot a plane into a skyscraper? Surely they are. We are not living in a perfect world with perfect choices. In the real world we live in we simply must be able to take out the Attas before they can do us harm.

At the risk of sounding barbaric, would that we could have "rendered" Atta and his cellmates to Guantanamo in advance of 9/11. Right?