Meghan Cox Gurdon: These are good times for terrorists

How gratifying recent events must appear when seen through enemy eyes.

Scotland has released the only man ever convicted in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jumbo jet, flaming pieces of which fell into the village of Lockerbie. After only eight years in prison, Libyan secret service agent Abdel Basset al-Megrahi was flown back to a triumphant reception in Tripoli.

al-Megrahi is mortally sick, of course; the not-exactly-ironclad case against him was up for appeal, of course; Britain wants Libyan oil, of course. Still: Terrorists took down a jet filled mostly with Americans, and two decades later the putatively guilty party has got away Scot-free.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the harder the Taliban fights, the more Americans lose interest in beating it. The Taliban gave succor and shelter to Osama bin Laden in the months leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Afghan militants are killing American troops in record numbers, cutting off the fingers of villagers who dared to vote in national elections, successfully detonating huge truck bombs in Afghan cities. And eight years on, 51 percent of Americans say the war in Afghanistan is "not worth fighting."

Now the Great Satan, choking on debt and mired in recession, is turning on its own. Incredibly, the American government is reopening criminal investigations of CIA officers who, after the Sept. 11 attacks, persuaded captured Al Qaeda operatives to tell what they knew about further planned attacks on the United States.

Islamists can videotape themselves sawing through the necks of helpless American captives. They can drag the charred bodies of Americans through the streets of Mogadishu and Fallujah. They can plan and execute truck bombings and ambushes of American troops and international aid organizations.

And militants now know that, should they be apprehended, American interrogators cannot so much as wave a loaded gun or blow cigar smoke in their faces lest they face the disciplinary wrath of their own authorities. (It is true that American drones are managing on occasion to liquefy Islamists from above, but at least the United States isn't getting any intelligence out of them.)

Al Qaeda and its fellow travelers must find this wonderfully encouraging. Here is President Barack Obama, acting through his Attorney General Eric Holder and egged on by the American Civil Liberties Union, doing the hard work for them of demoralizing and undermining American intelligence operatives.

"Our government authorized the use of torture," Holder said in a speech to the American Constitution Society in June 2008. "We owe the American people a reckoning."

Actually, what the executive branch owes the American people above all is the preservation, protection and defense of the Constitution; that is why every incoming president swears to fulfill these duties upon taking office.

The Republic rests on the Constitution, but the reverse is also true; the Constitution and all the benign and enlightened principles it embodies rest on the continued strength and moral will of the Republic.

If that moral will is undermined by hauling interrogators into court for making suspected terrorists feel a little uncomfortable -- which is all that a waved gun or blown cigar smoke amount to -- then America's current leaders are not taking their nation's future seriously.

Terrorist sponsors, like the militants themselves, must be enjoying the spectacle. Teheran's mullahs, having suppressed that inconvenient recent expression of Iranian democracy, have named an alleged terrorist -- a man wanted by Interpol for a bloody 1994 bombing in Buenos Aires -- to be the country's new defense minister.

You can hear their mockery from thousands of miles away.