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Comment by stackbutterflow | Hacker News Reader

Some comments in this thread are appalling.

Even if every single person held hostage at Guantanamo was directly involved in a terrorist attack they should not be tortured and detained forever without a proper trial. Revenge achieves nothing but more suffering. What has been done can never be changed but we can ensure that no more innocent will be hurt by setting the bar high enough so that even people proven guilty are not treated like sub humans. How we treat the worst people in our society sets the bar for the innocents inadvertently caught in the cogs of the judicial system.

It is better that 10 guilty persons escape than 1 innocent suffers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio

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The acts of 9/11 should have been considered a crime, and the remaining planners and perpetrators - and those planning and training for future actions - brought to the USA and tried.

That’s what a country the USA aspires to be in its best moments would’ve done. It would’ve been a shining example of what a liberal democracy could be.

Explain, for instance, where you would have the captured leaders of ISIS tried? In a US court? Where then when they are found guilty? Into a US prison? Returned to their country of origin? There is a reason that after all the talk that Obama did about closing Guantanamo, he didn't even try.

A bunch of them are literally on trial at Gitmo right now. [1]

It shows quite a lack of can-do attitude to think that in the last 20 years we couldn't have come up with something. We did come up with Nuremberg after all.

If only there was an international criminal court set up specifically for "trying individuals for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression" [2] in which folks could seek justice. Nah, that'd never work, which is why the US is helpfully not a signatory. Even though, and this is true, the US played a central role in its creation.

The issue isn't lack of venue clearly it's lack of due process.

[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/08/19/the-inter...

[2] https://www.icc-cpi.int/

>It is better than 10 guilty persons escape than 1 innocent suffers

What if the escaped guilty persons cause more than one innocent to suffer? Seems like an obvious flaw in this aphorism. Maybe works for petty thievery, not so much crimes of great bodily harm.

> What if the escaped guilty persons cause more than one innocent to suffer? Seems like an obvious flaw in this aphorism.

It's a principle of justice that was arrived at through a lot of thought and experience. It of course takes into account that the guilty people that slip away due to this principle will cause harm of their own.

But a justice system without this principle, one that does not place a high bar for what makes one guilty, one that isn't very careful about labeling innocents guilty, will cause far more suffering. It makes systematic abuses of power more likely, and affects far more innocents ultimately. This only becomes more and more true as the power and reach of the state gets higher and higher compared to that of an individual who might be a potential criminal.

On the other hand, systems where the bar for guilt is too high err too much towards not punishing criminals. Eventually such systems are rejected by their subjects and collapse, either totally or into anarcho-tyranny. This is especially true of states with great power over the middle classes, but little power or willingness to exercise it over the worst criminal element. There's a balance to be found in the middle between standards of guilt that are too high or too low.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_T._Francis#Thought_and_...

>Francis's term "anarcho-tyranny" refers to armed dictatorship without rule of law, or a Hegelian synthesis when the state tyrannically or oppressively regulates citizens' lives yet is unable or unwilling to enforce fundamental protective law.

> Eventually such systems are rejected by their subjects and collapse, either totally or into anarcho-tyranny.

Are there any actual examples of this happening? The link doesn't cite any.

Anarchy-tyranny in 1980s New York (see “Context and Background”) led to this famous act of vigilantism and subsequent acquittal via what was essentially jury nullification:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_New_York_City_Subway_shoo...

Recalling a DA is firm rejection of his vision for a more-permissive justice system:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chesa-boudin-san-francisco-da-r...

In terms of total collapse, see Venezuela (“Public Opinion” subsection highlights ineffective courts and weak rulings):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Venezuela

Pretty thin evidence to jump on a white supremacist’s pet theory.

The state of law and order in Venezuela is thin evidence? How many countries’ justice systems would need to collapse to convince you of this concept’s validity?

The “anarcho-tyranny” idea is orthogonal to Francis’s other and later views, and has become a mainstay topic in mainstream conservatism. Here it used in a Newsweek article by Hispanic conservative writer Pedro Gonzalez:

https://www.newsweek.com/president-bidens-anarcho-tyranny-op...

> The state of law and order in Venezuela is thin evidence?

It’s evidence of something, but not a too-high bar of criminal conviction.

> has become a mainstay topic in mainstream conservatism

This says bad things about modern mainstream conservatism, not good things about Francis.

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