fatvegan

There is a whole lot of crowing going on in the right-wing media about how the left-wing media seems to think that David Hicks is more innocent than Hicks himself does. A lot of people certainly complained about the validity of his guilty plea, but you can complain about that without believing he is innocent. If you think that torture is bad and say so but then someone confesses to something serious under torture, nothing has occurred to validate torture. Nor to invalidate an opposition to torture. Torture is a kind of self-validating technique, because it can extract everything it desires. You can torture someone into signing a document claiming it was only right and reasonable that they be tortured.

Mock trials are rather similar because they can dictate terms to the extent that outcomes are predetermined. America's legal system was carefully crafted to deny the powerful the outcomes they might desire. If you're going to bias a legal system you're probably better to err on the side of powerless rather than the powerful. In one sense, that is very dissatisfying - which I think is why the neocons have changed it for Guantanamo Bay - but the old way seems to have proven pretty effective and stable.

I've still never heard anyone claim Hicks is completely innocent or is a nice person. People were just confused about how the US expected to get an unbiased outcome given the system that had been constructed. They're not even content to weight the system against the defendent. They're so scared of a single bad guy being set free, that any path by which an accused might be found innocent has been removed. That, to me, is what is most silly about the whole thing. In principle, I doubt many people are opposed to the idea of David Hicks going to prison for a while. But I think you do probably have to work a bit at persuading people it's the right thing to do.