Judging Detainees’ Risk, Often With Flawed Evidence

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/world/guantanamo-files-flawed-evidence-for-assessing-risk.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=judging%20detainees%20risk&st=cse

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 9:05 AM
Subject: re: Judging Detainees’ Risk, Often With Flawed Evidence
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

   When judge Silberman said "candor obliges me to admit that one cannot help but be conscious of the infinitely greater downside risk to our country, and its people, of an order releasing a detainee who is likely to return to terrorism" he discounted the damage wrought to the credibility of the U.S. and to the Rule of Law in holding a man without due process of law. A judge operating from the posture of fear will always choose the Hobbesian autocratic state.  Cheney and his cronies spent years cultivating exactly judge Silberman's response.  Our Founding Fathers however held to a different vision, They saw that the individual's human dignity must be upheld even when that was inconvenient.  I am ashamed that we as a nation have lost that.

   Should we be surprised that 25% of the men released from Guantanamo have subsequently been accused of terrorism? If we had interned only innocent men, I would expect that some of them would emerge angry and violent. That's a fault of our detention program, not of our release policies.

Barry Haskell Levine