By Barb Shelly, Kansas City Star editorial page columnist

Proving that the third time isn't always the charm, President Bush's No. 3 attorney general Michel B. Mukasey has a piece in today's Wall Street Journal arguing that U.S. civilian courts aren't capable of handling terror suspects.

That's a valid opinion. But the curious part comes at the end, when Mukasey asserts this:

...critics of Guantanamo seem to believe that if we put our vaunted civilian justice system on display in these cases, then we will reap benefits in the coin of world opinion, and perhaps even in that part of the world that wishes us ill. Of course, we did just that after the first World Trade Center bombing, after the plot to blow up airliners over the Pacific, and after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

In return, we got the 9/11 attacks and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents. True, this won us a great deal of goodwill abroad—people around the globe lined up for blocks outside our embassies to sign the condolence books. That is the kind of goodwill we can do without.

It sounds like he's claiming a cause-and-effect here. Trying terror suspects in civilian courts led to the 9/11 attacks. If so, that's an amazing rewriting of recent history.