(Anabel Dwyer is an attorney and adjunct professor in human rights and humanitarian law at Cooley Law School, from which she graduated in 1987. She is a co-founder of Urban Options, a Lansing nonprofit environmental organization. A native of Reading, Pa., she moved to Lansing in 1966 with her husband, David, an anthropology professor at Michigan State University. They met in the Peace Corps when they served in the first group to work in Cameroon in 1962. She is a long-time activist who worked against the Vietnam War. Her legal activities including serving on the team that won a decision from the International Court of Justice in 1996 that declared all countries were obligated to complete nuclear disarmament. Last year, she and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark defended Phillip Berrigan against charges that he had thrown blood on military aircraft to protest the use of toxic and radioactive material in the Persian Gulf War. Gene Hayhoe interviewed her about how the United State should react to the terrorism attacks.)

"President Bush said, ‘They are totalitarians, they only understand force.’ If force is ipso facto totalitarian, how can we justify our own force, greater or even equal? That is, you can't justify killing a group of civilians and say that it's a justifiable use of force because we're Americans. You can't use force in the same indiscriminate way in general. And to use force is to become, in Bush's own words, the very people that are defined as terrorists. So they are caught in a very serious bind, and the only way out is to use the legitimate systems of law we've developed.

"The U. N. charter was developed for this reason. The International Court of Justice was developed. We have treaties, we have agreements -- about terrorism, about hijacking civilian airplanes. These can be used. There's no doubt these guys are criminals, but the guys who did it are dead. So, if you have to prove aiding and abetting, there better be some real proof. Otherwise, you are doing the same kind of collective punishment.

"So then the question gets back to what are the solutions, and obviously one is for the U. S. to go to the International Court of Justice, raise all these issues against the Taliban in the court and have a court decision. I just raised that with the International Law Journal people at DCL (Detroit College of Law, now part of Michigan State University), and they said ‘They the Taliban) won't listen, they won't pay any attention,' and I said, ‘Well, as a matter of fact, 90 percent of the International Court of Justice decisions have been complied with, more than 90 percent. If you think that Afghanistan is complicit in what is essentially a crime against humanity, then it is the U.S. responsibility to bring Afghanistan to court.

"If they have proof that Osama bin Laden did something, then, as the Taliban says, bring us the proof and then we'll consider extraditing or trying him in our own courts, which is exactly the premise of all these special tribunals around Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Nuremberg, which is what we're trying to do with the International Criminal Court, which of course the U. S. is undermining because there are worried people like Kissinger would be brought before it.

"If we believe that Osama bin Laden is an indictable criminal, he's running a criminal operation, then we do what we do here with monsters. We indict 'em and go get 'em. You don't bomb New York when you see mobsters out killing people, you don't bomb Oklahoma or Michigan because Timothy McVeigh and Nichols came from Michigan. It's just not what you do in a criminal proceeding.

" … Among the second- and third-generation families (of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there's been not only physical but psychological terror beyond anything that you can even imagine, and it's true in the Marshall Islands, it's true among downwinders, it's true about uranium miners, most of whom are indigenous in this country, it's true of the 600,000 people who made the bomb in this country who now have a compensation act (to assist) because we admit that they were in fact exposed to berylium and all sorts of radioactive stuff that killed them, and we did it deliberately.

I don't know what that is if it's not terror. It's state-sponsored terror at its worst. So, if we're going to follow the money, we have to realize.... I was just playing with this today: $5.8 trillion into nuclear weapons, which is since we started and if you take that as 56 years, it's something like $23 million an hour, you'd have to do the math yourself. In Michigan we have sent $10 billion a year to the Pentagon since 1980, $10 billion.

We don't have any money for our educational system, we don't have any money to clean up the Great Lakes, we don't have any money to do all sorts of things that we ought to be doing, saving our land and our water and our children's futures and all the rest of it. We put it all into this completely useless monster military machine. Nobody has a clue how much money has gone in, how much of a failure it's been, how much Carl Levin is tied into it, how much Debbie Stabenaw is tied into it.

They (the media) said the other day it only cost $200,000 (the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon). that's what's really astounding – that we've dumped all this money into controlling the world with our weapons and tactics of mass destruction -- huge amounts for a lot of private gain."