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For a moment there, I was heartened by President Obama’s 60 Minutes rebuttal of Cheney’s obnoxious criticism, about whether torture and detention outside the rule of law have kept us safer. Sure, he scoffed at the notion that our system of justice can’t handle those accused of terrorism. But in the same breath, he ridiculed the idea of giving detainees Miranda and other rights accorded in our system of justice. Which is it? Is our system of justice up to the task, or isn’t it? Recent reports suggest that many Iraq War detainees are probably innocent. If this is the case, what is special about these defendants that requires a different category of justice to be applied to them?Obama’s stance falls into the trap of labeling the accused as being some form of the category “terrorists,” before the evidence has seen the light of day. If the presumption of innocence is a worthy American value, then it should be applied whenever Americans are the decision makers in matters of justice.
