Osler's Razor

[UPDATE: You can now download the bin Laden article here. Just click the download box in the upper left at the link.]

There were a lot of great comments yesterday to to the 9/11 post. Sometimes I'm really impressed by the intelligence of those around me.

In reading those comments, especially the well-written post by Anonymous 12:54, I remember a little article I wrote after 9/11 which reflected some of what he was discussing. That article, Capone and bin Laden: The Failure of Government At The Cusp of War and Crime, 55 Baylor Law Review 603 (2003), was a little piece (12 pages) arguing that our system of government has a fundamental weakness which was exploited by both bin Laden and Al Capone. In short, we are good at fighting wars against large armies with our own centralized military and relatively good at fighting crime with our decentralized police forces. Our weakness is when acts of crime look like war and when acts of war look like crime, and fall into the gap between war and crime.

Al Capone essentially became a governmental body with an army, which made it very hard to confront him through the criminal justice system, while the army was not brought into the fight. With bin Laden, he committed acts of war which (up until the acts themselves) looked like crime. The military was unable (and remains unable) to catch him, which criminal justice was essentially not brought into the fight.

Good at war. Good at fighting crime. Not so good at the stuff in between.