It's the eve of the second anniversary to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I've already seen a few hints of it in the media, most notably the airing of a documentary about the two towers last night. The images still resonate, but thankfully not in the paralyzing way they did two years ago. I still couldn't watch the entire show.

So I'm reading a news article about a speech W gave today, and I'm struck by a quote where he wants to expand capital punishment to cover acts of terror.

"Sabotaging a defense installation or a nuclear facility in a way that takes innocent life does not carry the federal death penalty," Bush said in calling on Congress to make these type of crimes punishable by death. "This kind of technicality should never protect terrorists from the ultimate justice."

And I ask myself, exactly how does capital punishment serve as a deterrent to the type of person that would participate in a suicide attack? And while I'm at it, I was thinking about the latest tape that was released today that was purported to be of Osama bin Laden, and I wondered why our rhetoric couldn't be more about fighting religious extremists and addressing the problem by stamping out ignorance and misinformation rather than chest-thumping and carrying on about how we're going to squash our enemies who are, by definition, "servants of evil" like the bugs that they are?