A fantasy scenario of trying Bin Laden.

Lawrence Wright, author of “The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," was asked by a "member of the intelligence community" to use his screenwriter skills to concoct a futurist scenario of what we would do if we caught Osama bin Laden. That got him thinking, and he wrote this op-ed:

First, don’t kill him....

And, please, don’t send him to Guantánamo or torture him in an undisclosed location.....

But don’t bring him to the United States to answer for his crimes, at least not at the beginning....

We should, instead, offer him to the authorities in Kenya, where, on Aug. 7, 1998, a Qaeda suicide bomber murdered 213 people in the attack on the American Embassy....

Then take him to Tanzania, where on the same August morning Al Qaeda hit another American Embassy, killing 11 people, most of them Muslims. ...

Thus exposed as a mass murderer of Africans who had no part in his quarrel with America, Mr. bin Laden would be ready to stand trial for the bombing of the American destroyer Cole and, of course, 9/11. By treating him as a criminal defendant instead of a enemy combatant, we could underline the differences between a civil society and the Taliban-like rule he seeks to impose on Muslim countries and eventually the entire world.

Mr. bin Laden could go on to many other venues to answer for his crimes — Istanbul, Casablanca, Madrid, London, Islamabad — but in my opinion there is an obvious last stop on his tour of justice: his homeland, Saudi Arabia, where hundreds of his countrymen and expatriate workers have died at the hands of Al Qaeda. There he would be tried in a Shariah court, the only law he would ever recognize.

If he were found guilty, he would be taken to a park in the middle of downtown Riyadh known as “Chop Chop Square.” There, the executioner would greet him with his long, heavy sword at his side. It is a Saudi tradition that the executioner personally beseeches the audience, composed of the victims of the condemned man’s crimes, to forgive the condemned. If they cannot, the executioner will carry out his task. After that, Osama bin Laden’s body would be taken to an unmarked tomb in a Wahhabi graveyard, as he would have wanted.

I don't quite understand this scenario. Why would he proceed past the death penalty as a consequence of the first trial? And what makes you so sure the Saudi "audience" wouldn't forgive him? And wouldn't his followers all along be figuring out their own strategy, pursuing their own ends, as their leader held the public spotlight? Wright is so focused on how to use the symbolism of trial to convey the right message to the world, which is fine as far as it goes. But he seems seduced by his own idealism and hope. I'd like to see a second scenario, where idealistic officials embrace the Wright plan, and everything that can go wrong does. Now what?