It would be nice if the trial and likely conviction by military tribunal of the man who proudly labels himself the mastermind of 9/11 guaranteed relatives of the victims a great deal of comfort or helped them put the tragedy behind them.
And maybe it will help some of those family members, in a way that cannot be precisely gauged.
But it may not. What verdict can genuinely comfort the person who lost a spouse, a child or a parent when hijacked planes slammed into the Pentagon and into New York skyscrapers, and when heroic passengers brought down yet another plane that might have struck some other high-profile target? What sentence, however deserved, can fill the void in thousands of hearts and lives?
No, what comfort may be had by those who lost loved ones is in God's hands more than in the hands of officials in any courtroom.
But that does not diminish the importance of the military tribunal that will try admitted 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as well as four co-defendants. They were arraigned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, recently.
If convicted, they could receive the death penalty.
And it is beyond any rational dispute that they would deserve it.
Not because that is what many of the victims' relatives want, but because it is the only just sentence, considering the scope of the 9/11 slaughter.
It is a small victory for common sense that the defendants are being tried at the military tribunal rather than in a civilian court in New York, as President Barack Obama had sought. His administration initially halted the military-tribunal charges against the men, as if they were somehow entitled to the same full constitutional due process guarantees as a U.S. citizen who had committed a crime on our soil. In fact, as non-uniformed overseas enemy combatants, the men are not entitled to those protections, and Congress was right to block the civilian trials.
Nonetheless, that addresses only the legal and constitutional issues, not the personal ones. The families still will suffer, no matter the outcome at Gitmo. And the world still will be faced with the reality that nearly 3,000 lives were snuffed out casually and needlessly.
Doing justice in this case will not change that. But it may dissuade future would-be terrorists from committing similar acts. And even if it doesn't, justice is always worth pursuing, for its own sake.