I just want to co-sign some of what Glenn Greenwald has to say in response to this post from Marc Ambinder:
If you're interested at all in the future of detention policy, you might to make time to read a scathing and now declassified opinion of Judge Kennedy on the case of the Yemeni detainee (Odaini), available on line. If the re-engagement rate cracks the myth of the left that all detainees are innocents, habeas corpus losses such as Odaini's demolish the myth of the right that all detainees are cutthroat super terrorists.
Marc Thiessen tried this straw man recently when he was trying to fudge the statistics coming out of the Gitmo Task Force report. This is what I wrote then:
Thiessen trots out the straw man that "The Left" sees all the detainees as "really innocent goatherds," but that's never been the argument. The argument has been that the burden should be on the government to prove these people are dangerous, and in a number of cases, the government has avoided doing so. When it has been forced to, it has lost about three-quarters of the time. Thiessen thinks the government should be able to imprison any Muslim suspected of being a terrorist indefinitely without court review and is then obligated to torture them because they are Muslim.
There's a difference between "they're all innocent" and "don't hold them without proof". This as Greenwald writes, is "so obvious it shouldn't need to be stated." Post-Boumediene, it's also settled law. There's enough of this kind of thing on the right without a gifted reporter like Ambinder contributing to it, and I know that wasn't his intention. The irony is that Ambinder's equating something the left doesn't believe with something the right does hints at just how reasonable the left's position is: Outside of an active war zone, the government should have to prove its accusations in court. Period.
There's a separate question, which is that the left believes that most of the people held at Gitmo over the past decade were innocent. The left does believe that. But the Bush administration must have believed it too, because they let hundreds of detainees go during their time in office. Gitmo's fairly low "recidivism" rate--20% if you believe the government, 4% if you believe the independent estimate--suggests that most of the people held were innocent. Either that or Gitmo has some magic rehabilitative power that we need to be using in our own U.S. prisons, where the recidivism rate is 66 percent.
We're really setting the intellectual bar low here if we say that a government accusation of wrongdoing is tantamount to a conviction in a court of law in terms of certainty, and that anyone who believes an individual should be tried before they're punished is maintaining that the accused is necessarily innocent.
UPDATE: Marc has altered his claim in an update, referring only to "parts of the left."
-- A. Serwer
