Thanas wrote:Continue with civilian trials, compensate the guys who are wrongfully accused/held/tortured (and by compensation I mean the kind of money an american citizen would get), make a formal apology and vigorously prosecute the Bush junta and the CIA/other scum.
Of course, none of that is going to happen.
Um... As I understand things, an American has no right whatsoever to sue the government as a whole. So the most compensation an American can expect from a hostile government is to be driven to their doorstep when they get released, instead of sent out of the prison doors with $200 in-hand.
Formal apologies I'm all behind, and I'd love nothing more than to see everyone from the guys holding a pitcher of water and a towel right up to Georgie the Stupider hauled up on charges and vigorously prosecuted.
And I'm all for trial-by-jury. Problem is that we have a situation unprecedented in our system. I mean, I fully agree with you that everybody who was grabbed on shaky intelligence, everybody falsely accused, should be immediately repatriated either to their homeland, any other civilized country that will take them, or if nothing else granted full citizenship as the least recompense we could make for having turned them into stateless people.
But, what should we do with people like Ghailani? For every good reason, all the evidence appears to have been extracted by illegal means, and should be dismissed, but at the same time they do pose a legitimate risk of harm to the country and its people. Releasing them if there's no legally-obtained evidence against them is the only just thing to do, but if they
do decide to continue their war - or in the case of those who were grabbed illegally, to retaliate - then any further acts of harm they commit are effectively on the government's hands, and the very first time one of them is found with a rifle, having shot at an American, there will be people baying for impeachment, blood, and (dear sweet sol I hope not) possibly riots or internal unrest resulting from it.
I'm not saying that we should admit evidence gathered through torture, because that sets a legal precedent I think nobody but the howling morons who masturbate to the sight of Jack Bauer beating the shit out of somebody wants to set. By the same token, holding them without charge indefinitely is heinous and (I think) illegal, and definitely in violation of the spirit of our laws.
But what's the alternative? Drop them off at an airport in their homeland or Somalia with $200 in cash? $200,000? $20,000,000? Grant people whom we have reason to believe have harmful intent towards the country itself citizenship and a huge cash settlement because the Bush Junta got torture-happy?
I think the term is, damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't. What's been done is wrong, and it can't be changed. What's
being done is also wrong, and it
can be changed. But while our justice system demands that evidence gathered illegally be inadmissable and thrown out, it was meant to deal with situations like police officers beating a confession out of a street punk, not somebody with nothing to lose and an ideological mission to carry out brutal attacks against the people of the country.
Obviously, condoning torture is unconscionable, and even using information gathered by it, even if we are trying the torturers for torture right next to those they tortured, would be heinous. But, while we do hold it as a tenant of our legal system that it is better to see ten guilty men walk free than one innocent man incarcerated, it's a little harder to accept when every reasonable person would believe the guilty man who walks will only take the opportunity to attempt to commit harm again.
What's your answer for that situation? Do we give people like Ghailani, if there's no admissable evidence against them, a large cash settlement and drop them off in some third-world hellhole, and just
hope the money won't go straight into a terrorist cell war-chest - if not be used to outright found a new terror organization? That would seem to be what our justice system demands, and I agree on principle, but principles start to look awfully... Abstract and meaningless when standing up for them results in a bombed building burning and charred corpses being carried out on CNN.
