How to Handle bin Laden.(possible scenarios, following the capture of Osama bin Laden)(Brief Article)

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 20

New York. Roy Jenkins is in town, promoting his superb biography of Winston Churchill. The diners were reminded of his eminent career and accomplishments, including a term as home secretary, during which the initiative was taken to abolish capital punishment. At the question period, Barbara Walters asked whether his views on that subject were as adamant as ever, in the age of Osama bin Laden. He replied that what he had most objected to, in 1965, was the "stately procession" of the condemned as, so to speak, they inched their way, seat by seat, cell by cell, toward the gallows.

It will not be that way with Osama, but it warrants reflection to ask: How will it be? There's nothing of the innocent-until-proved-guilty business in the air. The only people who question his complicity in terrorism are Islamicist sympathizers who cling to a jurisprudential straw, reminding us of the eleven months required at Nuremberg to prove that Hermann Goering had a hand in promoting aggressive war and killing and torturing an ethnic division of mankind.

But that does not answer the mechanical question, What do we do, after the noose Secretary Rumsfeld refers to, has tightened to the point of isolating Osama in a cave near Kandahar, which cave at the moment of inquiry is encircled by 28,000 soldiers, 238 machine guns, 20 artillery pieces, the opening floodlit, half the world's press, cameras poised, radioing to each other and to the world, with special intensity to those New Yorkers who live in the area of Ground Zero, everyone's eyes trained on the opening from which Osama will have to debouch, in a non-stately approach to the end?

We know that the Defense Department and indeed the State Department do contingency planning. What does the U.S. do if Nation X a) drops a nuclear bomb on Detroit, b) threatens to do so, c) is caught sending missile weapons to Iraq, d) calls for a summit conference to discuss the question of nuclear development? Answer: We a) drop a nuclear bomb on them, b) threaten to do so, c) institute a blockade, d) call for an emergency meeting of the Security Council. Etc.

So how will it be with Osama?

a) He kills himself, and his body, on a ...