_sabotage_ wrote:I thought we didn't know how many prisoners we were holding. And if we publicize them, isn't that kind of against the whole point of doing away with due process?
No. The reason that "due process" is now side-stepped is because, in order to convict someone in our court system, the prosecutor needs a lot of evidence. Less evidence is needed to suspect and arrest. "Who" is arrested/detained at Gitmo, taken away from the war zone to be held, for example, is known, it's just not widely publicized. But "who" is investigated in this or that town for suspected acts of treason/terror quite often makes the news.
Funkyterrance had it partly right. If a suspected terrorist - one with enough evidence to arrest, but insufficient to prosecute - is detained, then that suspect cannot further terrorize.
The other part is, since most of those plans are going on outside of our country, we have a tough time getting physical evidence to prosecute, so we have to fall back on witness testimony if we were to prosecute.
Bush "waterboarded" in order to get witness testimony, but it's rather like asking the custodian at Enron what the CEO was doing. Too many layers between, with each flunky being assigned only his part in it.
Here's the rub, I've mentioned before: if folks training those with visas enough to get into our flight school overheard something that made it sound like those would-be pilots were planning an assault on national buildings using planes as weapons, well, without written evidence of those plans we couldn't have stopped them without sidestepping "due process" to detain them for longer than is normal in our court systems.
If you could turn back time, and had enough evidence to suspect what would happen, and had some evidence pointing to those pilots, if it was in your power, would you detain them?
Should we not have gone after Bin Laden because we didn't have sufficient physical evidence to convict him in our court of law? Because we didn't. We had a lot of reason to suspect, we even had his claims - but law enforcement officials know that they get false claims all the time, for whatever twisted reasons people want their names in the news or whatnot, and claim to be responsible for acts they didn't commit.
In other words, if we had arrested him and put him on trial, he would've gotten off despite we KNEW he was behind alot of it, he'd made it his reason for living to take down the US.
Terrorists don't fall under our military systems, and they fall a bit outside our legal systems, so "something different" is needed to prevent us from sitting helplessly, unable to do anything "legally." Once it's in law, it IS legal.
We know that there are folks getting legal visas to perpetrate acts of terror, and we know that sometimes US citizens are also "in" on terrorist acts, but until the act takes place, it's really tough to get enough evidence of what was planned to stop it without detaining those suspected of doing/planning partly to stop them, and partly to try to get their testimony of what was planned so we can go after others.