We didn’t’ send bookish lawyers to prosecute Hitler, Togo and Mussolini. The old stereotype response, “oh, yea – you and what army?” comes to mind.

In past wars, there was the U.S. Army – a military-level response to invasion threats.

Now, the lead prosecutor of the U.S. case against Omar Abdel Rahman, the “Blind Sheik” mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, warns criminal prosecution fails to protect America against Islamic jihad terrorist attacks.

The threat is beyond the criminal justice system’s league, according to Andrew McCarthy, and he wrote of the problem in his new book, “Willful Blindness, A Memoir of the Jihad.”

McCarthy’s hindsight comes simultaneously with a U.S Supreme Court decision earlier this month, Boumediene v. Bush, in which five of the nine justices said enemies captured and held in military operations overseas have U.S. Constitutional rights.

Specifically at issue in the decision was the writ of habeas corpus, enabling the accused to petition against being held pending trial – which assumes many additional criminal justice “due process” rights.

McCarthy said in dealing with the “rights” of the World Trade Center bomber terrorists, he found an organized insurgent enemy, like a fifth column, at war against America, in America.

“I knew nothing more about radical Islam in 1993, when I got brought into this, than anybody who’s had a fairly good education in the United States,” McCarthy said in a recent interview.

Meaning he had slim to no preparation. “Maybe I knew about the barest of headlines, but [did not have] a whole lot of substance underneath that,” he added.

“This whole experience has been a real eye opener for me in many ways; most basically, by realizing the people who founded our country had a much more humble and better idea about how the country would need to be defended.”

McCarthy said in America’s beginning, the founding principles of a common defense excluded the courts in times of war.

“I guess what my battle scars are about is trying to square [the] use of our criminal justice system as a means of protecting us from people who actually mean us an existential threat,” he said.

McCarthy has spoken about the prosecution of Rahman and 28 other Islamic terror conspirators, but mostly to law school audiences concerned about due process and other legal issues.

He’s heard comments about how he “batted a-thousand” and the system worked. “In point of fact, in eight years we took out 29 people,” McCarthy said.

“When you consider [it]…I think of 1993 as a declaration of war; from that point to 9-11, we had an enemy that was growing bigger and bolder,” he added.

“They were attacking us yearly, and our responses, even as the enemy became more ferocious, was to add more counts to the indictment – that’s real impressive, isn’t it, to people willing to immolate themselves in terrorist attacks?”

The court actions included a 1998 indictment against Osama bin Laden – a lot of good that did, McCarthy said. “We’d like to think we’re more in control than we are,” he warned.

McCarthy said there had been a successful infiltration of the Islamic jihad group plotting the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, but because of a dispute with the FBI, it was withdrawn.

The infiltration resumed after, discovering a plot for simultaneous attack of the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the UN building and possibly the FBI headquarters in New York City. “So we managed to stop that attack,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy states boldly the Islamic supremacist ideologues, the religious despots who command Islam and its “fatwa” rules of law, do not oppose us because of moral or political actions.

The wellspring of jihad warfare draws from Islam itself, the Qur’an. The cause of Islamic terrorism, he says, is about doctrines of Islamic religious despotism.

McCarthy said responding effectively to the threat requires knowing the enemy: religiously ideological Islamic militancy and the supremacist claims of Islamic law. “The ideology that we’re talking about here is 14 centuries old,” he said.

“It existed and thrived before there was a United States…commanded the allegiance of old and young, rich and poor…People who believe it’s a divine injunction,” he added.

“They believe no one has the right to make laws [like the U.S Constitution] other than the laws that were handed down by Allah directly to Mohammed 14 centuries ago.”

He proposes an aggressive, pre-emptive, stay-on-the-offense approach – war – instead of tentative appeasement in more and more Islamic demands sliding toward total surrender.

Giving criminal justice due-process rights to terrorists – massive burdens for our intelligence and military agencies on the front lines – is no way to fight a war, McCarthy concludes.