US never declared war on McVeigh

APRIL 19 MARKED the 10th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, and in coverage of the day the Globe ran an article on the disappearance of extremist militias (''Militias' era all but over, analysts say," Page A1). This disappearance has happened as a result of law enforcement and criminal justice efforts against domestic terrorism. Not a war.

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The culprits in the Murrah Federal Building bombing were pursued, detained, trailed, and ultimately held accountable for their crimes --all the while respecting the tenets of this nation's laws. We did not broaden the tragedy into a war on anyone who thought like or sympathized with these criminals.

Hate and rage have not been erased from our national bloodstream. But the conduct of the criminal proceedings against Timothy McVeigh was never about his ideology. It was about the criminality of his behavior. While some might embrace his ideas, none could justify his crime.

Contrast that with our conduct of the war on terror. Five years, two wars, thousands of lives, and billions of dollars later, Osama bin Laden remains at large. We wall our nation against dangerous ideas by turning away scholars and artists who might have associated with our terrorist enemies. We live with an ever more opaque government asking to dismantle only those civil liberties that are obstacles to their war effort.

Candidate John Kerry paid a price for saying that the war on terror might be better seen as a law enforcement issue. This was somehow seen as being weak on terror. Perhaps our mistake was not to have seen it as such all along. By opting for the rhetoric of war over that of law enforcement, we elevate the perpetrators from the status of ''criminal" to that of a ''soldier." This is something we rightly refused Timothy McVeigh and we have given all too freely to Osama bin Laden.

TOM DRISCOLL
Holliston