Civil Liberties vs. Security - A False Dichotomy
Submitted by Reg NYC on September 16, 2006 - 12:33pm.
detainee abuse | military tribunals | NSA Wiretapping | War on Terror | Civil Liberties | Human Rights | National Security | Soapbox
The debate about the NSA wire tapping or detainee abuse or military tribunals is always framed as a choice between our safety and our civil liberties. The question is always, 'Should we give up our civil liberties for our security?' This is a false question. In fact, I would argue that giving up our civil liberties makes us less safe.
The problem before 9/11 was not that our intelligence agencies did not have enough raw data to prevent the attacks. The problem was that they did not have the resources (or the will, but that's a whole other entry) to analyze it, to sift through the mountain of raw data that they had to find the useful bits and put them together (dots and all that). When you broaden your intelligence gathering, you do so to diminishing returns. You get a lot more data, but less of it is useful. This makes the analysis problem worse. It increases the size of that mountain of data exponentially, while only increasing the number of useful bits by very little. This makes us less safe.
Now, much has been said about preserving the rights of detainees because it protects the rights of our troops, and because we serve as an example to the world. And all of that is true. I agree whole-heartedly. But what hasn't been said is that our justice system was not only created to protect our rights and to be nice. It was created to make sure we get the right guy. Torturing someone until he confesses to something that he didn't do just to stop the torture and then railroading him with a sham trial does not make us safe. I've heard this framed in the 'Is it better to put a innocent man in prison or let a guilty one go free?' argument many times. This is a false argument. If a crime has been committed, putting an innocent man in prison IS letting a guilty one go free. Either you got the right guy or you didn't. If we don't treat the terror detainees humanely and give them fair trials, we'll get the wrong guys. This makes us less safe.
And why it's not important to get Bin Laden, but it's so damned important to nail Salim Ahmed Hamdan to the wall that we have to give up the Geneva Conventions and the Constitution of the United States is beyond me.
that didn't go over at all. :/
Bush is trying to go back in time to wipe out anything we have against him that would give us any reason to prosecute against him (or the interrogators, or the officers, or the soldiers... vague my ass), and may I say, since he holds no respect for the internationals, he doesn't want them coming back to hold his feet to the fire either. "We don't want the internationals to decide for us, do we?" or some such he said yesterday. That should be a key to anyone with half a brain that he's concerned for himself, not our soldiers, not our citizens.
Reg, you said everything I am thinking!
To paraphrase... "Anyone willing to sacrifice a little liberty in exchange for a little security deserves neither."-Thomas Jefferson
Ron Esquerra
Alger County Democratic Party
Candidate for County Commission
Proud Veteran, Wesley Clark Democrat.
Even those of us who didn't vote for him, collectively as a nation we are getting everything we asked for. Until we wise up as a whole we will continue to get it, my bet is that 08' will get here before that happens.
Ron Esquerra
Alger County Democratic Party
Candidate for County Commission
Proud Veteran, Wesley Clark Democrat.
June 21, 1995
"NOT GUILTY"
As I write this, there seems to be a very real possibility that O.J. Simpson will not be convicted of murdering his ex-wife and her friend Ronald Goldman. This causes me to reflect, once again, on our legal system and on precisely what it means when that system pronounces a verdict of "not guilty."
Several years ago, when my family was living in Wichita, there was a famous triple murder—the Fager killings. Someone broke into the Fager home, apparently surprised the two Fager children, killed them, then killed the father when he surprised the killer. The older of the Fager children, Kelly, owned a Volkswagen bug, which the killer stole to make his getaway.
Authorities traced the car and the apparent killer to Florida and apprehended him. He was brought to trial. My memory of the trial and its surrounding events has become fuzzy, but the defense put forward a somewhat implausible explanation that the accused did, in fact, steal the car, but not from the Fager home and that, therefore, he was merely a victim of circumstances. Some of the testimony was conflicting. The jury acquitted the person who most people still believe committed the murders.
That very Volkswagen had been in my driveway more than once. My younger daughter, Donna, had a boyfriend whose brother was dating Kelly Fager. The four had double-dated on more than one occasion. Donna was on a church choir trip when the verdict was announced. She called us from New Orleans and we broke the news. She was outraged, nearly to the point of hysteria. She wanted to come home immediately, although she ultimately pulled herself together enough to finish the trip.
The only consolation I could offer her was that in our legal system, "not guilty" does not mean "innocent." It literally means merely NOT guilty. "Guilty" in our legal system has a precise definition: it means that twelve people were unanimously convinced that the prosecution provided sufficient evidence to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" (some states even add "to a moral certainty" here) that the accused in fact did what he or she was accused of doing.
Two other definitions emphasize the point:
innocent: free from guilt or sin...blameless
acquit: to set free from the charge of an offense by verdict, sentence, or other legal process
To acquit an accused, then, says nothing about his or her innocence. Innocence appears to have a theological implication. Only God can free people from sin and render them blameless. A jury can merely set them free from legal charges—by virtue of the prosecution's failure to establish the criteria of legal guilt above.
There are any number of reasons a jury could acquit someone who in fact perpetrated the crime. For some crimes, there simply isn't sufficient evidence: no witnesses, no traces whatsoever. The classic example is the your-word-against-mine trap of rape cases. The whole world may know in their hearts that that the accused did it. No matter. If there's no evidence, the prosecution can't establish legal guilt. Or, the prosecution may simply do a poor job of presenting the case. Or the defense may present an alternate scenario plausible enough to create reasonable doubt. In our legal system this scenario doesn't need supporting evidence. It just needs to be possible.
As long as we continue to believe that it's better to let 100 guilty people go than to convict one innocent person, these frustrations will remain. I, for one, wouldn't want to loosen the legal requirements for guilt. Just imagine if YOU were the unjustly accused defendant.
O. J. Simpson will enjoy the same protections against convicting the innocent that we all do. If he did it—and whether he did or did not do it isn't the issue here—he may well walk. If he walks it will be because the jurors were not unanimously convinced that the prosecution proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Usually, reaching this conviction means believing some evidence and disbelieving other evidence. If that other evidence can reasonably be true in light of the evidence as a whole, the jury is obligated to acquit. Acquittal doesn't mean innocence. It just means not legally guilty. We've chosen a legal system to protect the innocent. Let's leave it that way.
I'm reminded of something I read, I think in Newseek, either during or about the Nixon/Watergate years. There apparently was some belief in the Nixon administration that the end justifies the means. The columnist said, "They don't understand that in our system the means ARE the end."
Our system is more about process than results. Processes that protect the rights of individuals and assume innocence are the foundation of our legal and political systems. To change any of that would, in the finest sense of the term, be un-American.
Stan Davis
Lakewood, CO
BE THE CHANGE you wish to see in the world.
If not us WHO? If not now, WHEN?
High profile trials give us an unrepresentative picture of this. The reason a case goes all the way to trial in the first place is usually because the evidence is not very strong. A vast majority of murder investigations result in a confession or a plea bargain. But everyone watches the high-profile trials and sees that a high percentage of them end up in aquittal and think that this is a huge problem. It isn't. It's certainly not a 100 to 1 ratio like this article makes out.
A much bigger problem, which was of course my point, is that they let a guity man go free not because thay had him and let him go, but because they had the wrong guy to begin with.
Has the writer of this article ever considered that idea that maybe OJ and the "apparent killer" were innocent?
The reason Bush says he needs to clarify article 3 of Geneva and we never had a president (or anybody else) need it clarified before is that all our presidents (and everybody else) understood what it means. It's not vague. When you have a president who is too stupid to know what it means (and I think he does know what it means) then it's time we had a no confidence vote like they do in a parliamentary system and hold a new election right now.