American media can be amazingly myopic. Since the September 11 attacks, the media has pretended that the U.S. is the only democracy that had to ask itself fundamental questions about fighting terrorists.

In reality, European, Anti-Podean and Asian democracies have been asking hard questions about freedom and safety since the 1970s. Can a non-citizen (or even a citizen) be held on the mere suspicion that he is involved in terrorism? For how long? Can the phone calls of terrorists be intercepted without a warrant? And so on.

In the media’s zeal to pretend that Bush has a tyrant in the making, journalists have largely overlooked what other advanced democracies have done in their wars on terror. In general, they have taken a harder line against terrorists without being overly fussy about the “privacy rights” of people with the top terrorists’ cell phone number.

Take Spain’s headline-making capture of ETA commande ^[1]r of its “commando” (i.e. terrorist) units. No word yet on exactly how the Spanish police were able to capture this elusive villian. But Spain’s laws and its lead counter-terrorism prosecuting judge have been known to aggresively use wiretaps and detention without immediate habeus corpus to break terror cells. Some terrorists have even been sent to Arab nations where they would face almost certain torture…

Perhaps President-elect Obama should study the European, Australian, and Japanese examples. Governing is a lot more difficult than campaigning. He can start by asking how many advanced democracies give terror suspects full-blown civilian trials?

After all, Obama should not be unilateral is his approach to fighting terror.