[lit-ideas] Re: CIA Secret Prisons
- From: "Judith Evans" <judithevans1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2006 23:44:16 +0100
And just to belabour the point
Do we identify with the terrorist being so
> > rendered?
there's ample evidence that many such people are
not terrorists and indeed may have committed no
crime at all.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Teemu Pyyluoma" <teme17@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2006 11:29 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: CIA Secret Prisons
> --- 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...
>
>
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