I’ve read Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confession or statement or whatever you want to call it. There’s a good chance that some of it’s self-aggrandizing blarney. After all, if you’re going to spend the rest of your perhaps short life enjoying the hospitality of the Great Satan, why not paint yourself as a Jihadist superman?

Regardless of the rough proportions between truth and b.s. in his comments, one thing shines through – this is a profoundly evil man. The following statement, originally redacted but subsequently released by Reuters especially makes quite an impression:

"I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl.”

His posturing as a freedom fighter and his other by-now-tired rationalizations of mass murder fall into one category. Perhaps the moral relativists out there, the ones who responded to 9/11 by jerking their knees and begging, “Why do they hate us?”, could find some sympathy for such a wretched creature if his crimes were "limited" to putative acts of war.

But his gloating over Daniel Pearl’s murder is another thing. Pearl’s murder wasn’t a military operation, even as defined by Mohammed and his noxious ilk. It was just murder. And Khalid Seikh Mohammed carried it our personally, and now considers the hand that performed the savagery to be blessed.

HOW CAN WE RESPOND TO SUCH EVIL? One thing is clear. Most of our institutions aren’t capable of playing a productive role in a war with such a determined and lethal enemy.

I’m not talking about the predictable roster of nitwits who are rushing forward today to downplay KSM’s evil or even to express sympathy for him because he’s spent so much time being uncomfortably detained. Every society has its outliers – ours is no different.

No, I’m talking about our actual institutions, practically all of which have grown too comfortable and complacent to change their ways even though we’re under attack. Do you think our court system could provide a satisfying trial for KSM without turning it into a sickening three-ring circus that ultimately demeaned the thousands of lives that he took? That of course bring us to the media – don’t even get me started.

But wait – there’s more. From academia to our political system to our two major parties to our entertainment community, there are few aspects of our society capable of playing a constructive wartime role. Thank God for our military, which is seemingly the only institution in our country that is up to the challenge.

ON HIS BLOG TODAY, ANDREW SULLIVAN asked a powerful question that was originally put forward by Tom Mallon:

"Are American writers, artists, and thinkers truly prepared to admit that Islamofascism is a real, and even imminent, threat to everything they are accustomed to thinking, saying, and creating?"

Blogger Tom Gara provided a strangely disinterested “no” to that question:

So how big is the threat? For me, it just isn't that big. Islamic terrorists, if they are lucky, will manage a couple of medium profile bombings of tourist sites each year, and maybe something larger (New York, London, Madrid) every few years. This sucks, and our security services should relentlessly hunt down these people and take them out of the game. But is it really that much of a threat to the world?

Our societies, cultures and economies are just too strong to be even mildly shaken by this lame bullsh*t. Just because some gaggle of religious lunatics manages to kill a bunch of westerners once every 6 months, does anyone really believe that "everything we are accustomed to thinking, saying and creating" is under threat? I call bullsh*t.

We are SO going to beat these freaks.

Guys like this seem to think that if they describe something with a barnyard epithet enough times, it magically becomes so. In this case, I wish he were right. Unfortunately, the threat to our way of life is posed by a lot more than a few “freaks.” It’s truly a wonder that a guy smart enough to use a computer could be so profoundly wrong about something so serious.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his circle are the tip of the spear, not the entire threat. There are potentially tens of millions more just like him out there. Can our society adjust to that reality? Some days, I’m more discouraged than others.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.