The War on Terror Is Over Lawyers are about to smother the war on terror.

(Analyst's note: Must read.)

By DANIEL HENNINGER

Shakespeare wrote, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” As we know, that didn’t happen. Four hundred years later, they’re killing us with the smothering pillow of hyper-proceduralism. Now the lawyers are about to smother the war on terror.

This Monday, the same day that Attorney General Eric Holder named a special prosecutor to investigate persons who conducted the CIA's interrogations in the war on terror, Scotland's Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill stood before his parliament and gave this defense for releasing convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi:

"It was not based on political, diplomatic or economic considerations. . . . My decision was made following due process, and according to the law of Scotland. I stand by the law and values of Scotland."

Faced with a similarly fastidious assertion of the law's triumphal self-regard in "Oliver Twist," Mr. Bumble replied: "If the law supposed that, the law is a ass—a idiot." Mr. Bumble added something acutely relevant to what is happening to the war on terror: "The worst I wish the law," said Mr. Bumble, "is that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience."

The experience of a world beset by terror eludes the eyes of a Kenny MacAskill, Eric Holder and others in the Obama administration. The rest of us may suffer for it. ....