The Wrong Defendant

A group of teachers at Stuyvesant High School are threatening to sue the city if it doesn't clean up asbestos from the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack. The teachers are upset by coughs and other ailments, our Jacob Gershman reports at page one of today's New York Sun. They'd be wise to remember who the real culprits are here. If they pause to reflect, perhaps they will direct their litigious impulses not at the government of New York, but at the regime at Riyadh. It is the Saudis, after all, who have increasingly been found to be neck-deep in the financing of the attacks of September 11. They are already being sued by family members of the September 11 victims. Given the slow pace at which tort reform is proceeding and the even slower pace at which President Bush is launching the war on Iraq, the lawyers may get to the terrorists and their funders before the U.S. Marines do. And given the mincemeat that the city's teachers union made out of Mayor Bloomberg in the last contract negotiation, we'd give them and their lawyers better than even chances against the terrorists. Why waste such combativeness on internecine warfare when it could be channeled more productively against the genuine enemy?