Dale Amon writes at Samizdata:

We don’t know what he actually did so how can we decide his fate from in front of our comfortable computer screens? For all we know he could have been dragged along by events and lain cowering in the basement wondering at his own idiocy. Or perhaps he went to fight with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance never imagining he could end up fighting his own country. After all, on September 10th how many of us would have considered US forces in Afghanistan as even the remotest possibility? If that were the case he is a soldier of fortune who got caught up in the wrong war at the wrong time. A few years in prison and a slap on the wrist would suffice.

The problem with this is the statement “for all we know.” Unfortunately for Mr. “Marinhadeen,” we know a good deal more. He continued to display his idiocy after being pulled from the flooded basement. We know that when asked if he supported the twin towers bombing, after much prodding and avoidance, he finally answered “Yes.” How does that square with the theory that he just got caught up with the wrong crowd, and never imagined that he’d be taking up arms against his countrymen?

While we still have a first amendment, in times like these words like, “I support the attack on the WTC” have consequences. Certainly they could be grounds for, at a minimum, deportation of someone not in the country legally. It’s not clear exactly where the line lies between simple opposition to US policies and sedition, but when someone is found, armed, among people who have been shooting at American troops, and he offers such words, he is so far across it that he can’t even see it from there.

I don’t think that in this case hanging him as an example is all that useful–there are very few other loonytoons like him to deter, but I would like to see him do some hard time, and be given opportunities to use it to undo his (non)education in Marin County, and learn how to think, and distinguish good ideas (freedom, etc.) from bad (flying planeloads of innocents into buildings full of innocents).