This v/s That

The bomb-plot arrests in New York and Colorado seem to be the results of proper police work and established procedures, suggesting that we can be safe from terrorism without becoming a police state—what a concept.

The guy visiting from Denver who got caught in the middle of the operation last week had a pretty unpleasant time, but so far I’ve read nothing that suggests police misbehavior aside from maybe seizing the guy’s rental car without telling him (although it may have been towed for illegal parking). Let’s hope the other legal immigrants in Queens who hosted the main suspect—and may or may not have known anything about his alleged plans—are treated properly and not railroaded as accomplices merely because of their Muslim names or Pakistani connections.

What a contrast between this FBI operation and the decade-long regime instituted by George W. Bush and partially continued under the current administration—with the entire Republican party as a cheerleading squad—involving wild paranoia, wacko ‘interrogation’ schemes leading to phony conspiracy hunts, disdain for protection of the innocent, whosesale trashing of normal police work, macho posturing, officially authorized torture and apologetics for outright murder.

I was recently called to jury duty and was amazed to see how carefully and meticulously the system, for all its faults, tries to ensure that the accused are treated fairly. Human society worked for thousands of years to get to this point after millenia of arbitrary royal abuse and justice-by-caste. This is what the blowhard tough guys insist we toss into the garbage.

By contrast, in Chile the police under military rule got so used to beating confessions out of suspects that they forgot how to investigate. I remember covering a rape-murder case in the 1990s in which the suspect—quickly tried and convicted by the pinochetista news media—insisted he was innocent and had only confessed to stop them from torturing him.

Ha ha, said El Mercurio, the Chilean version of Fox News, they all say that, pointing to evidence the police found at the murder site: a makeshift upside down cross, which purportedly showed that the kid was a sicko who used the corpse for his Satanic rituals.

Turned out that the cross had been placed there by a imprudent news reporter to commemorate the victim, an act made possible because Chile’s Keystone Kops never secured the crime scene. Then the accused’s family produced a copy of the kid’s complaint about a stolen radio that he had filed at another police station 100 miles away—exactly at the time of the girl’s death.

If he hadn’t had that stroke of luck, he’s still be in jail today. That’s what happens when you get impatient with the drudgery of detective work and go for the torture short-cut, that is, when you dump individual rights in favor of collective safety.