Somethin' ain't right here
Like all freedom-loving Americans, I was relieved to hear the cautionary, but ultimately positive story about the prisoners freed in Tulia, Texas yesterday. The jist of the Tulia story is that a corrupt policeman in a small town in Texas was able to get dozens of African-Americans arrested and convicted on drug charges on the basis of very limited evidence. Eventually, the truth did come out. Then the jail door was thrown open. Hallelujah!
But what are us freedom-loving Americans to make of this story? A U.S. Appeals court ruled that not only can the government detain people for years without filing charges, and not only can they keep the names of the detainees secret, but they don't even need to provide detailed evidence for why the secrecy is called for. This secrecy makes the kind of self-correction exemplified by the Tulia case impossible. For all we know, the government could be holding hundreds of people who have no connection to terrorism whatsoever. The evidence that provides that rationale for holding them may be as flimsy/nonexistent as the evidence in the Tulia case.
Since the evidence (or maybe it's more accurate to call it "information", or just "stuff") that led to the detentions is secret, there's no way to judge how good it is, if it exists at all. But we can look at the evidence for WMD in Iraq. Evidence for going to war. Evidence that was presented in Congress, at the UN, in front of God and everybody. Now imagine what kind of evidence/stuff is used to secretly lock up a poor sap with no rights...
Woody
9:37:17 PM 
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