Brilliant

Piracy as a precedent for the legal definition of terrorism.

This may be the smartest critique of how the Bush Administration and the rest of the world handles terrorism...we've tried two methods, both with severe practical problems. The first was treating terrorism as a criminal act - it is how we handled the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and subsequent Al Queda attacks against the US. This method clearly failed. It failed practically, as incidents and support of terrorism rose during this period and it failed conceptually because criminal pursuit is designed to punish after the act - a certain low level of crime is socially preferable to the draconian measures required to enforce some sort of pre-crime system. Punishing the 9/11 hijackers after the act clearly misses the point.

Post-9/11, we've been treating terrorism as an act of war against non-state actors. We have run into problems with this policy as well, holding prisoners in Guantanamo for indefinite periods and bumping up against pressure from states on how we conduct wars of preemption. We've failed to persuade the rest of the world to embark on this "War on Terror," with the same determination, using the same methods, and consistency. This has hampered our effectiveness and not necessarily been economically and militarily efficient.

The above article adopts a new approach, rooted in an old approach, by classifying terrorists the same way pirate's used to be classified, as enemies of all of mankind, and all states. Per the article, the only way pirate's were successfully stopped were when the European states collectively decided to put a stop to it. Well worth the read.