On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, Alberto Monteiro wrote: > But the flexibilitity of the police force is sort of necessary if > you don't want to live in a total anarchy, in a state where each > one can kill the other knowing that the law will suffice to create > a "reasonable doubt" that he is innocent.
"How much flexibility is appropriate," is the big question, then. To my mind, top-secret agents given license to hunt and kill accused terrorists (if they haven't been tried, or haven't announced themselves, then they are only accused) have no place in our ordinary concept of police. Such people are soldiers at best, assassins at worst, and although we might use them in a war or a sufficiently warlike context, we do ourselves a grave disservice if we treat them as an extension of any system of justice. But if we use assassins as instruments of punishment--hunting down and killing alleged terrorists after the fact, without trial--then we have confused justice with war, and IMO given the government far too much latitude in its use of deadly force. It also undermines every notion of international justice, the idea that war criminals or terrorists and their sponsors should be subject to universal rules of justice. At the moment, of course, there is no universally agreed-upon rule of justice, but those western nations that push for such rules need to be prepared to abide by them. > >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. > > > Yes, you are right; however, the damage that a car thief causes to > the society is much smaller than the damage caused by a terrorist. How much damage is caused when we allow our "intelligence" agencies to kill the innocent? > >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. > > > But this was not what he said, so I jumped on his throat <evil grin> I must have read him differently. > >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. > > > Is Mr Mustafah guilty just because he was filmed in the > company of other (known) terrorists, while he was holding > a machine gun and pointing it at the head of a 5-year-old > children? > > Yes How about when the suspect is wearing sunglasses, the photograph is grainy and hard to make out, and we're relying on the paid testimony of some guy who claims to be his third cousin twice removed that the person in the picture really is Mr. Mustafah, and then we rely on our field office to make a decision about whether or not to terminate the suspect? The thing is, if we have incontrovertible evidence that the suspect is guilty, then there's no reason not to bring him to trial, unless a) our justice system is hopelessly corrupt, in which case we've already lost, or b) for some reason the suspect *cannot* be brought to trial owing to some military or diplomatic issue, in which case you have a situation more akin to a war than to a police operation. > >> 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! > > > Bah. If the above mentioned shooter escaped the police > siege, stole a car (by killing its driver; why not?) and > started fleeing with this car, do you think it would be > reasonable to blow up his car? This wouldn't be self > defense. All right, then: self-defense and protecting public welfare. Killing people on scanty evidence who don't pose an immediate threat doesn't fall in those categories, IMO. > > >> 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. > > > No, it includes those that *may* have commited a crime > and that are escaping, if this crime is horrible enough > that the "lesser of the two evils" [killing an innocent against > letting a criminal escape] is killing. That set does not exist in a system of justice which presumes that people are innocent unless proven guilty. Letting a criminal go free is preferable to killing an innocent by definition. (How a society behaves in practice will at times stray from the rule, of course--but that doesn't mean the rule should be changed.) > > > > >The question is, how did you get from "suspected of being a terrorist" to > >"undoubtedly identified as a terrorist," > > > You have to analyse it case by case, of course. And > "undoubtedly identified as a terrorist" is impossible. You > can always poke holes in every story, no matter how > obvious it was. Just watch any Hollywood movie and see > cases of innocent people who have all proofs against them. The question is how the case by case analysis is performed. I don't demand perfection in the method, but I think the method must be subject to public scrutiny. Assassins given a cloak of "top secret" and allowed to operate without oversight cannot help but fuck things up, IMO. The nature of the job is such that mistakes will be made, and without some kind of strict oversight such mistakes can never be justified in terms of the greater public good. > Ok, so I am a Fascist or a Communist. I have to refrain from > making any racial comment otherwise those of dutch or > english ancestry - which makes them prone to racism - will > accuse me of being a Nazi. Huh? > My point is that *sometimes* the urge to stop the terrorists > outweight all the finesse that a democratic state requires > in normal times. And my point is that how a society protects itself is very much a matter of public interest and should be a matter of public record as much as possible. Creating top secret agencies licensed to hunt and kill a specific class of accused individuals is bad policy, IMO. Terrorists are (relatively) rare. A society's security apparatus is usually ubiquitous, so it must be held accountable if you don't want it to get out of control. > Heck. don't you think it was right to bomb the Nazis of the > Japanese in WW2? Lots of innocent people were killed, > and they didn't even get a trial! And for the most part we knew what we were doing and why. We knew that the Nazis were murdering people up and down Europe; we knew that Imperial Japan was murdering people in Asia and all over the Pacific. What I fear is the notion of having a class of "police" who are allowed to kill people with little or no public oversight, which citizens learn to take for granted and justify in the name of stopping terrorism (or communism, etc.). We, the public, will likely never know whether or not Mr. Mustafah was really guilty at all, and that is not how a society that values democracy and human rights should behave, IMO. Marvin Long Austin, Texas
