Fallen towers should rise out of ash.

At crime’s heels, justice should always come full circle.

That’s why, eight years after a reverberating American tragedy, five Gitmo detainees — including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — will stand trial in a civilian Court in lower Manhattan, just blocks from where the Twin Towers once stood.

Reliving a decade’s worth of fear, anger, and unburied grief, New Yorkers must do as they’ve always done. With the strength of a nation — and the indivisibility of one people — they will meet the pain of that day’s events with courage, placing good faith in their leaders to bring justice to the 2,752 Americans killed, and proper closure to the ones they left behind.

It isn’t about revenge. To be clear, we should derive less satisfaction from a trial like this than a sense of natural correction — a justice executed by a country (and legal system) comfortable in their own legitimacy. Beyond the shroud of military tribunals, we should hold terrorists accountable not for their actions as “enemy soldiers” but the human atrocities they committed as illegitimate sub-state actors against thousands of innocent American civilians.

Something like this cannot take place in Oklahoma.

If Khaled Sheikh Mohammed must tread US soil, let these sidewalks burn his soles. Let him face judgment staring into the faces of the very people he sought to destroy that September morning, and find, after eight years, this country’s unbreakable heart.

If a trial must take place, where else but New York?

It’ll be difficult. As KSM, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi prepare to tread US soil, many public figures have politicized the Obama Administration’s approach. Questioning the nature of a New York trial, Gov. David Paterson expressed displeasure with the Administration’s “insensitivity” to circumstance.

“This is not a decision that I would have made,” commented Paterson. “I think terrorism isn’t just attack, it’s anxiety and I think you feel the anxiety and frustration of New Yorkers who took the bullet for the rest of the country…It’s very painful. We’re still having trouble getting over it. We still have been unable to rebuild that site and having those terrorists so close to the attack is gonna be an encumbrance on all New Yorkers.”

But justice isn’t sweet — merely necessary. And to people like Lorie Van Auken, emotions of “anxiety and frustration” do not surpass a need for moral accountability. For this reason, Manhattan is not just an appropriate location for the 9/11 terror trials — it is the only seemingly appropriate location.

“I am pleased that they’re moving these trials to New York near the scene of the crime, giving the families that were most affected [the opportunity] to see the trials,” said Van Auken, who lost her husband Kenneth in the 2001 attacks.

Others expressed similar concerns in the interest of victims’ families.

“We hold our trials in the open, and that gives defendants an opportunity to spew propaganda,” said Matthew Waxman, a Columbia University law professor and former Pentagon lawyer. “They will try to put the U.S. government on trial.”

But holding court anywhere else would not lessen the pain of loss, or the possibilty of our exposure to radicalist propaganda. Justice, in the words of Clarence Darrow, has nothing to with what goes on in a courtroom. It is what comes out of a courtroom — a verdict that federal prosecutors are prepared to obtain, and a verdict the people are prepared to accept.

“I have every confidence the nation and the world will see him for the coward he is,” Holder said. “I’m not scared of what [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] will have to say at trial — and no one else needs to be either.”

As an East-Coaster who lives 30 minutes from Manhattan, I say let them come.

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