How Many Innocents Must Pay To Lock Up One Terrorist?

cross-posted at DailyKos

The Pentagon, in an unreleased report, is claiming that one out of every seven Guantanamo detainees have "rejoined" the fight. I wrote about how they neglect to define the term "rejoin fight" and how the Pentagon has grossly embellished this statistic in the past. However, let us, for a moment, assume that this number is completely accurate.

Let us forget that if we released them, we cannot really say they are "rejoining" the fight because we clearly never knew for a fact they were part of the fight to begin with. Let us just accept this number as accurate. That means, that for up to seven years, we kept six innocent people locked away indefinitely, possibly tortured, for every one terrorist. Think about that for a moment, I can wait....

Done? Great. Now think about if we applied that same mentality to any other crime. When our founding fathers created certain rights, like habeas corpus, they knew that we would inevitably let some guilty men go free. And we all know that happens. We all hear stories of criminals going free due to some technicality. That is a hard truth. Yet there was a deep and noble principal that stood behind it. A principal that, we would rather a guilty man go free than an innocent man lose his freedom. It was a courageous principal, based on a notion that we must protect the individual right to freedom by all means.

Our founding fathers were not incompetent. They knew full well the consequences of their actions. Yet today, we treat those principals as naive. They are addorable, quaint notions that do not take into account the harsh realities of the world we live in. Crap. It is always the realpolitiks that claim the realistic high ground. Rather, it is naive to believe you can protect individual rights while throwing them out the window when it gets a little scary. I will conclude with this question my father posed to me:

How many innocents are we willing to lock up in order to put away one terrorist? Is it six? Becuase that is what we have done, at the lowest possible estimation.