[lit-ideas] Re: CIA Secret Prisons
- From: Teemu Pyyluoma <teme17@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2006 15:29:50 -0700 (PDT)
--- Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> So we have a choice of selecting with whom we
> primarily
> identify. Do we identify with the terrorist being so
> rendered?
(...or)
> Do you take the other route and identify with
> thousands of
> innocents who are spared from sudden death or
> lifelong
> misery?
Who we symphatize with is irrelevant. It seems to me
that Eric is operating on an assumption that rights
such as right to free and fair trial is a gift by the
society to the accused, and as such something taken
from the society as a whole. Easy and common enough
mistake to make, and as such I will not mock him for
it, as tempting as it is. The thing is that strong
invidual rights make better governments. One for
example wonders why is it that liberal democracies are
in general the safest, most peaceful places on earth,
if liberal courts make stopping terrorists and other
criminal so hard?
Fundamental rules of trial are there to protect truth,
protecting the accused is a nice side effect. Hearsay
is ignored because the reliability of the wittness can
not be tested. Defence is given access to the
evidence precisely so that it can point faults in the
evidence, thus leading to better evidence. That
criticism makes us wiser by showing where we are wrong
should be obvious to any philosopher.
If a bureaucracy is ordered to produce x, and the
quality of x is not controlled, bureaucrats will
happily produce something that they call x in
abundance. See Soviet Union for a well known example.
If CIA is given orders to catch terrorists while
relieved of any burden to actually prove that they are
terrorists, they will catch a whole lot of terrorists.
White House should just set annual capture targets so
off-shore prison planners would know in advance
exactly how many new inmates they will be receiving.
This will lead to gargantuan waste of resources, and
much less effective security, and the thousands Eric
asks us to consider dying in preventable terrorist
attacks.
I just realized that the above applies to Paul Stone's
suggestion to kill ALL the radicals...
Cheers,
Teemu
Helsinki, Finland
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