On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, Alberto Monteiro wrote: > I imagine that there was no *reasonable* doubt that those > guys that Mossad hunted and killed were terrorists. Or > do you require a formal judgement before they can be > declared terrorists by the Law?
The requirement of formal judgments, public trials, rules of law and evidence and so on, are sort of necessary if you don't want to suffer the whims of a police state. > But how much sure you must be before you can classify > someone as a criminal? In the hypothetical example I > made, of the guy shooting other people, well, you > might say he was temporarily insane, or he might be > *himself* under a gun, or... there can always be room > for any doubt. There's a difference between shooting someone in self-defense, and hunting someone down and murdering him because your network of informers tells you he was connected to an act of terrorism. I wonder how many known terrorists are "known" with sufficient evidence to convict an ordinary person of stealing a car, say, in a public court of law. > > > > Nope. You may be convinced that he is guilty, but in a > > democratic country it is up to a court of law (and > > *only* a court of law) to determine that a > > person is guilty. > > > But *before* a court of law declares him guilty, you > can�t even call him a terrorist; he was, at most, a > suspect of terrorism. So, when you say that a terrorist > is innocent until proven guilty, you are 100% wrong. I think Jeroen is saying that in a society that calls itself free and democratic, "everyone" must assumed to be innocent until proven guilty, including those accused of terrorism. Those individuals might be in fact guilty, true. But the question is about the standards to which we hold ourselves before we allow ourselves to say we *know* someone is guilty. Is Mr. Mustafah guilty just because a government official tells me he is? No. > And we don�t have to be too rigorous about this > "Court of Law" stuff; you agreed that in the example > of a man shooting other people from a building it > was reasonable to kill him - without a "Court of Law". Again, self-defense is different from hunting and killing the accused-but-untried. > So, you have declared that there are two non-empty > sets of people, one of those that can be killed > without a court of law declaring that they are guilty, ...in an act of self defense! > and another that can only be killed after a court > of law declares that they are guilty. ...a set which includes everybody not actively firing a weapon or the equivalent at you. > *I* claim that an identified terrorist, who was > undoubtly identified as terrorist, belongs to the > first set. Oh, I wouldn�t object that some sort of > trial was done; this might reinforce his terrorist > status for extremely skeptic people. But if before > the trial there is an opportunity to kill him, then > let�s kill him! The question is, how did you get from "suspected of being a terrorist" to "undoubtedly identified as a terrorist," and whether or not that process follows rules of law and evidence, and whether or not that process is open to review. In some societies, that process is a public trial in which the accused have the benefit of counsel and the benefit of the doubt. Societies which don't grant these benefits are usually called police states. Marvin Long Austin, Texas
