Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Americans believe our legal system is the crown jewel of our democracy, at least until we come across a really despicable savage like Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Then we seek Wild West justice, the rougher the better. Hang the monster from the highest tree.

Being of Irish descent and a notorious holder of grudges, I get it. If weapons were allowed at weddings and funerals, there would be no counting the wounded and dead in my extended family.

Most Americans agree with me. A new CBS News Poll finds that only 40 percent want Mohammed and his four minions to be tried in federal criminal court.

I wonder if some of them will reject their first instincts -- as I did, mine being wrong so often -- and wait for second thoughts to kick in. Thoughts like, vengeance can be had in a courtroom.

It’s not as cathartic as Hollywood thinks to have the villain shot dead in a blaze of Bruce Willis firepower. Better that he be captured, imprisoned and shamed before man and God like “the coward he is,” as Attorney General Eric Holder put it in testimony before the Senate on yesterday.

Giving Mohammed a trial hardens the line against President Barack Obama that he’s just too soft -- on Congress, on Republicans, on al-Qaeda, on foreign countries. That bow to the Japanese emperor was seen ‘round the world, shown in a near continuous loop, without acknowledgement that any dip at all from a very tall man to a very short one must be deep.

Mr. Tough Guy, Dick Cheney, weighed in, saying, “our enemies see it as a sign of weakness.” In Cheney’s world, only economic royalty, along with the barons of Halliburton and Blackwater, should be shown such deference. Japan no longer has enough money to merit respect.

Giuliani’s Take

Most of the pushback on the Mohammed trial is coming from Republicans, expressed most vividly by “America’s mayor,” Rudolph Giuliani, who says the 9/11 mastermind deserves no better than a military tribunal.

On a conference call organized by the Republican National Committee, Giuliani said that a federal trial will be too much of a burden on New York City, that Mohammed is not a common criminal but a foreigner who committed an “act of war,” and that a trial would inflict pain on families who lost loved ones in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. What’s more, since nothing that happens in New York stays in New York, Mohammed will get the worldwide publicity he craves, something Giuliani is expert on.

Giuliani seems to hope that we forget the praise he lavished on the prosecution of those behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Those proceedings, he said, showed that “New Yorkers won’t meet violence with violence, but with a far greater weapon -- the law.”

Common Criminal

From Mohammed’s perspective, one of the worst things that could happen would be to be tried as a common criminal rather than the soldier and martyr he wants to be. Who better to drive that home than a New York judge who knows how to keep order in the courtroom, and a couple of the city’s toughest prosecutors? It’s not as if the trial is going to be presided over by the American Civil Liberties Union.

As Holder said at the hearing, “I’m not scared of what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has to say at trial, and no one else needs to be afraid either.”

As for emotional pain, one of the advances in the U.S. criminal justice system is giving victims a place at trial and a chance to be heard. The families wouldn’t get that in Guantanamo.

What Giuliani and others overlook is that there is no longer much difference between a military and civilian trial. After the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the shortcomings of George W. Bush’s tribunals, Congress and the Obama administration granted more rights to the accused.

Sooner and Speedier

Either court would exclude anything gleaned from Mohammed’s 183 waterboardings. Both courts use the same procedures for handling classified information. Oddly enough, a federal court trial will come sooner and be speedier, since the new military rules have yet to be completed and tested in the real world.

The politics of the trial stems from Obama’s decision to announce the closing of Guantanamo before he had lined up takers for its prisoners. Now with unemployment at 10.2 percent, he could hold an auction for the officials in Illinois, Montana, Michigan and Colorado clamoring for the detainees to fill their underused prisons. The politician who wins the detainees isn’t going to get booted from office. He’s going to get a parade.

The fair trial of Mohammed will make a great courtroom drama someday, on par with “Inherit the Wind” and deserving of comparison to the Nuremberg trials. We didn’t have a court to try the Nazis when World War II ended, so we built one. It made America stronger.

(Margaret Carlson, author of “Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House” and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

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To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 18, 2009 21:00 EST