ANKARA – Imagine a terrorist organization that over a span of two decades kills 10 times the death toll of September 11. Imagine that after years of hitting and hiding, the head of that organization is finally captured by law enforcement and extradited to the nation where he and his gang committed the attacks. Bowing to international ideals, the country of the victims waives the death penalty, but declares the mastermind guilty of “treason” and sentences him to life in prison on an isolated island.

Now imagine a European court demanding a retrial – because the terrorist didn’t have access to a lawyer quickly enough.

That’s exactly what’s happening in Turkey, where the European mentality of treating terrorists like criminals, entitled to the entire due process of law, was reinforced last week when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the 1999 trial of Kurdish dissident leader/terrorist Abdullah Ocalan was “unfair.”

Depending on whom you ask, fighting between Ocalan’s Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan separatists (PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party) and the Turkish military has killed 30,000 to 40,000 people over the last two decades. One high-ranking Turkish official I spoke to emphasized to me, “That [body count] is at least ten 9/11s. When you feel the anger over 9/11, you understand how we feel about this.”

In addition to numerous terrorist attacks on Turkish government, Turkish civilians, Kurdish civilians, and his rivals, Ocalan and his organization have been involved in drug trafficking, robbery, extortion, arson, blackmail, and money laundering. Some international human rights monitors have compared him to former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet or war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The U.K. Guardian, in an editorial calling for Ocalan to be spared the death penalty, conceded, “Ocalan is a deeply unsavory character with much blood on his hands …” More Kurdish civilians have died at the hands of the PKK than at the hands of the Turkish army.

The European Court objection? Well, the first was that Turkish government held Ocalan for seven days before bringing him before a judge.

They also found that Ocalan had a “reasonably held concern about the trial court’s independence and impartiality” – the Ankara State Security Court. They also found:

He had no assistance from his lawyers during questioning in police custody; he was unable to communicate with his lawyers out of the hearing of third parties; he was unable to gain direct access to the case file until a very late stage in the proceedings; restrictions were imposed on the number and length of his lawyers’ visits; and his lawyers were not given proper access to the case file until late in the day. The Grand Chamber found that the overall effect of those difficulties taken as a whole had so restricted the rights of the defense that the principle of a fair trial, as set out in Article 6, had been contravened.

Initially, the Turks put on a brave face, and with the government declaring itself ready to retry him. Prime Minster Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that while his country’s judicial system would examine the call for a retrial, “whether this file is legally reopened or not, it’s a file that has been closed in the conscience of the people.”

The loudest grumble came from Yasar Buyukanit, head of the Turkish military’s land forces, was reported by the Anatolia news agency as saying that the judgment was “completely a political decision.” The major opposition party told the government not to retry him, and made ominous references to past “bloody days.” In recent days, the government has reportedly preferred the lesser step of “reopening the case file” to a full retrial.

This latest bit of legal wrangling illustrates the absolute folly of treating terrorists as criminals. If a European Union country captured Osama bin Laden, would their first concern be that he obtained legal council within a week? This illustrates the folly of the tired and dubious trope, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

It matters little if you’re blowing up civilians in the name of freedom, Kurdish independence, autonomy, or the latest rumor reported by Newsweek – the moment you start targeting unarmed men, women, and children, your tactics have put you outside the usual protections of the accused in the Western legal tradition. The proper response calls upon the tools of war, not law.

This is not to discourage the distinguished legal minds who have prosecuted terrorists in America and elsewhere – they do their jobs as well as can be expected, against a foe who exploits the protections of constitutions and legal traditions. These terrorists’ victims get no such niceties.

Most folks outside of the heavily protected offices of European judges recognize that the public doesn’t want terrorists tried and convicted with every “i” dotted and every “t” crossed. They want them dead.

Unfortunately for the Turks, they’re getting sucked into a bureaucratic, legalistic super state in which the concern of a terrorist’s “fair trial” seems to be a higher concern than stopping the terror itself.

Mr. Geraghty, a contributing editor at National Review, lives in Ankara.