I agree.  We should duly process his arse through a meat grinder.

As M1R pointed out, the Nuremburg trials weren't exactly the high point of Western judical practice. As much as the Nazis had it coming, there's no point in trying Bin Ladin if we can't be more consistent than we were then.

Gabriel:

Terrorists are different from your run-of-the-mill war criminal, in that they crave publicity for their cause.  Any kind of trial is going to be a media circus, with Bin Laden as the star.  I cannot think of anything worse for the US and its interests than a trial followed by his execution.  (Well, perhaps capturing him,  physically abusing him, killing him like a dog, and then displaying his remains, accompanied by cell-phone internet-streamed images of the whole action.  I imagine that is the scenario that many here would LOVE to see, which figures).

What would be best, would be for him to be killed in an obscure skirmish in an equally obscure part of the Pakistani-Afghan border.  The US should not risk resources and lives to try and capture him, when killing him will do.

Tom,

I agree. President Bush is correct. Osama, himself, isn't that important. Whack him publicly, you make a martyr out of him. Think: "Hit me, says the masochist." "No, says the sadist." By publicly downplaying Osama, President Bush is doing the right thing. It is the underlying ideology and the conditions that foster it that are important. This is one reason why Iraq made strategic sense. Take out one State in the Axis of Evil. Sow fear in another by geographically surrounding the primary remaining State in the Axis of Evil and positioning yourself to take out said State's proxy between your Army and Israel. Sad to say, this plain logic is lost upon the loony left.

Hank:

This may be a little hard for you to absorb, but wanting Bin Laden killed rather than captured and put on trial, does not imply support for what passes for the Bush administration's policy in regard to the Middle East and terrorism.  It has been utterly disastrous in almost every regard. 

The reason the Bush administration downplays Bin Laden (except around election time) is that they have been utterly unsuccessful in tracking him down.  Although nothing is guaranteed in this world, stripping US covert military and intel assets from Afghanistan to prepare for Iraq certainly did not make it easier to catch him.  Because of the emphasis on Iraq, Al Qaeda has been able to reestablish itself near its old stamping ground, while the Karzai government in Afghanistan basically controls Kabul and its environs.  A real chance of success--in a country whose inhabitants actually did welcome us--has been pissed away, thanks largely to an administration whose grasp of geopolitics is about the same as yours (not a compliment), and whose incompetence in the execution of its policies is almost without parallel.