The American System of Justice

The recent trial of a Guantanamo detainee in a civilian court turned out very strangely.  He was acquitted of most of the charges against one, while being convicted of just one (which will keep him locked up for a long time).  But most of the discussion in the press made it seem as if this was a failure of the justice system. 

My understanding is that the endproduct of a real, honest trial is unpredictable, such that even if a defendant is totally acquitted, it doesn't mean the trail was a bad one or a failure.  It should mean (and hopefully does mean) that it was a success in determining his true guilt or innocence.  But that was a perspective that I rarely heard, until reading it on Glenn Greenwald's website:

But the most important point here is that one either believes in the American system of justice or one does not. When a reviled defendant is acquitted in court, and torture-obtained evidence is excluded, that isn't proof that the justice system is broken; it's proof that it works. A "justice system" which guarantees convictions -- or which allows the Government to rely on evidence extracted from torture -- isn't a justice system at all, by definition. The New Yorker's Amy Davidson made this point quite well today:

Let’s be clear: if time in the extra-judicial limbo of black sites, and the torture that caused some evidence to be excluded, makes prosecutors’ jobs harder, the problem is with the black sites and the torture, and not with the civilian trials that might eventually not work out quite the way everyone likes. It’s a point that bears some repeating. Our legal system is not a machine for producing the maximum number of convictions, regardless of the law. Jurors are watching the government, too, as well they should. Ghailani today could be anyone tomorrow.

It's supposed to be extremely difficult for the Government to win the right to put someone in a cage for their entire lives, or to kill them. Having lived under a tyranny in which there were very few barriers impeding the leader's desire to imprison or otherwise punish someone -- and having waged a war to escape that oppression -- the Founders designed it this way on purpose. And they did so with the full knowledge that clearly guilty and even extremely evil people would sometimes receive something other than the punishment they deserve. Here's how Thomas Jefferson weighed those considerations, as expressed in a 1791 letter: "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it."

That courageous declaration -- and not the desperate, eager desire to sacrifice safeguards in single-minded, fearful pursuit of Security -- was the central calculus that drove the American Founding, shaped the U.S. Constitution, and formed the political identity which Americans claimed to embrace for the next two centuries. As usual, the people who are now screaming the loudest over the need to defend American Freedom are the ones who believe least in the values that were intended to define it and the principles that were intended to safeguard it.

What has it come to that such a totally conventional and reasonable view is so rare? It means that when it comes to terrorism, we as Americans are scared to death and have lost our sense of what freedom and justice mean. 
It's the same reason we're willing to grant the President the right to order the assassination of an American citizen.

As Greenwald puts it:

This is the all-justifying, cure-all solution for every problem: government officials run to the nearest media outlet they can find and anonymously scream "TERRORISM." No evidence is needed; the anonymity precludes all accountability; fear levels are quickly ratcheted up; and everything the Government wants to do then becomes justifiable in its name. That's the frightened, authoritarian society we've allowed ourselves to become.

All of this underscores the ambivalence I've had in watching the TSA controversy unfold. In one sense, this has all the ingredients of the last decade's worth of Terrorism exploitation: fear-based increases in pointless though invasive government power, surveillance and privacy infringements; further training the citizenry to mindlessly and meekly submit to directives from government functionaries; and, most of all, sleazy Washington influence-peddlers who spend time in Government ratcheting up fear levels and then return to the private sector to profit from that fear....

But the American Public, on the whole, is perfectly content with increasingly invasive government surveillance. They've proven that they will submit to virtually anything before the scary specter of Terrorism: putting people in cages for life without charges, torturing innocent people, invading and destroying other nations that haven't attacked us, assassination hit lists free of due process, to say nothing of the merciless domestic Prison State that eats up the lives of millions of their fellow citizens for no good reason, fills them with Taser-delivering electric shock at will, and degrades their communities and basic liberties with a deliberately endless and corrosive Drug War -- almost all of which has a disproportionate impact on minorities.