The firemen's memorial for the World Trade Center has kicked up a fuss. The statuary group was supposed to depict three firemen raising an American flag over the disaster site soon after the catastrophe of 911. The incident actually happened: a now-famous photograph recorded it. The problem was that the sculptors decided to improve on history by making the firemen ethnically diverse: black, white and Hispanic, respectively. The actual firemen were all white. The monument has caused quite a bit of embarrassment, not least to the firemen in the New York City Fire Department who belong to minority groups. They had not asked for any such thing.

As a fireman's son, I can't say that I am outraged, but I am a little exasperated. I see too much of this kind of thing. Not far from me (I live in downtown Jersey City, just across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan) there is a half-body statue one George P. McCulloh, the businessman who organized the building of the Morris Canal in 1822. This canal connected the Hudson with the Delaware River until 1924. The statue stands on what had been the canal's eastern end, which now is just a malodorous inlet in the riverbank. It's reasonable to a put up a little statue to commemorate local history like this. The bizarre thing is that someone decided the monument needed a racial-minority element, so George P. McCulloh has a tiny, bronze family of fleeing slaves in his lap. The idea is that the Morris Canal was an important link in the Underground Railroad before the Civil War. If it was, maybe the fact should have gotten its own statue.

Then there is the local monument at Exchange Place to Katyn Forest Massacre of 1940. It was erected to commemorate the execution of Polish army officers by the USSR during the period of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. The area is a historically Polish neighborhood, so this theme was a reasonable choice. The monument itself is not. At 25 feet tall, including the plinth, it features a huge statue of a cavalry officer with a bayonet thrust through his back and out his chest. This sculpture dominates one of the world's great urban vistas: the Exchange Place plaza in the new financial district opens on the Hudson River and looks directly across to the World Financial Center and to what had been the World Trade Center. On 911 and for days thereafter, that image of a man being stabbed in the back dominated the thunderhead of smoke billowing up from the Center. The juxtaposition of bronze grievance and fiery malice was a vision from a damned world.

Not all ill-advised symbols are cast in bronze, of course. One symbolic act that we could probably do without is the upcoming trial of the American Taliban, John Walker Lindh. (Estranged from his father, he does not use the "Lindh.") For one thing, the case will be hard to prosecute. The defendant controls the evidence against him, which at this point seems to consist chiefly of his own statements. Even those he cannot plausibly repudiate he can nevertheless contextualize. More seriously, he is charged principally with conspiracy. It just is not clear that what he did fulfils all the elements of a charge of conspiracy. The other charges against him, relating to support of terrorism, arise under new, untested statutes. It is a bad idea to mortgage the credibility of the federal government to a case in which both the facts and the law are debatable. This is especially true when all the defendant seems to have done is learn Arabic and get really dirty.

The real objection to the prosecution is this: it might succeed. If it does, an American court will have held that military service can constitute a form of criminal conspiracy. In a world in which the traditional distinction between domestic criminal law and international law is breaking down, that is not a principle the United States should be promoting.