Cost-Benefit Terror On Bali.(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(EDITORIALS)(Editorial)

Terror: As Indonesians clean up after another terror strike, there's plenty of hand-wringing about why it doesn't stop. For terrorists, though, there's little mystery: Indonesia's courts are making terrorism cheap.

Saturday's bombings at three crowded tourist restaurants on Bali were the fourth major strike against Indonesia in as many years. With 22 dead and 101 injured, there's no doubt this was an effort to drive out visitors. Tourism amounts to a quarter of Indonesia's hard-currency earnings. Scaring tourists away is an act of economic warfare.

But Indonesia's legal system doesn't seem to take terrorism seriously as a national threat. Through a string of preposterous acts and rulings, it views terror as a routine criminal matter. To many, it appears subject to all kinds of local give-and-take pressure.

The most obvious failure was this past March, when Indonesia's leading terrorist, Abu Bakar Bashir, spiritual leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist group, walked off with a 30-month prison sentence for his role in the second worst terror attack after 9-11 -- the 2002 Bali bombing that killed 202.

Since then, his sentence has been reduced even further, prompting local Indonesians to calculate that his sentence now amounts to about 2.78 days in jail per dead victim.

That waffling in the courts is an affront to the investigative work of the Balinese police, who swiftly and professionally pinpointed and rounded up Bashir's terrorists, only to see their work evaporate in the face of local politics by the time the case reached the bench.

Bashir's trial was conducted in a circus atmosphere with public pressure from fist-waving Islamist supporters. Bashir's trivial sentence was based on technicalities, making it clear that Indonesia's courts are loaded with judges who seem to respond less to national danger and more to political pressure from the street.