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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elroy who wrote (244276)	10/8/2007 1:40:50 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Those 2 objections aren't good reasons for keeping terrorists from coming to trial. When we try ordinary criminals, there is a chance that they won't get convicted, and it discloses to other criminals the method government uses to catch them in the first place, greatly enhancing other ordinary criminals' chances of success in their next crime. Yet we still do it. Elroy, ordinary burglars and murderers do not belong to a huge organization. Even when it comes to organized crime, criminal methods become very difficult, because your first trial is in a sense your last - you've told the organization you are on to them. So you must wait for years, gather evidence, essentially let the criminal enterprise continue, until you decide you have gone far enough and are ready to make the arrests. And that's a small group, who are just out for profit. Take 100,000 men motivated by religious fanaticism across many national boundaries, who are in a sea of millions of passive sympathizers, and you have multiplied the problem a thousand fold. Since we can't afford to let Al Qaeda operate freely for years while we infiltrate them (supposing we had competent intelligence services, which we don't) we cannot afford to wait all arrests til we have the big fish in hand. Since we can't, we cannot afford to arrest a few little fish and tell the big fish we have done it and exactly how we caught them. This is precisely what a criminal trial does. That is, if we are interested in actually hindering the execution of the next big attack. Some posters here seem okay with the idea of allowing the next 9/11 if we can demonstrate our moral purity to their liking in the meantime.But what am I saying? Nothing the US ever does will demonstrate moral purity to them. The US alone is subject to the harshest of moral judgements.