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to add another element to smooth's eloquent post
you seem to also be concerned that such trials would become political, which puts aside the fact that they are political from start to finish--"terrorist" is a wholly political category---it is a manner of designating a particular style of opposition to the existing order, which comes with particular effects, some of which chomsky and herman have outlined quite nicely in their work of the 1980s (summarized in herman and o'sullivan's book "the real terror industry") that include the seperation of "terrorist" acts from any coherent political motivation. what seems to me to underpin your position, in addition to what smooth outlined above, is a certain level of anxiety about having this category of "terrorist" itself become problematic through the mechanism of due process.
well, the category *is* problematic.
problems of evidence are of a piece with problems of definition of the crime.
maybe it is something like the category of "witch" in the canon law of the 16th-early 18th centuries. contrary to what you might expect, in this context spain did not prosecute many people on this charge because the courts found that there could not be a standard of proof adduced for a crime the existence of which could not itself be demonstrated. this in a space with a highly elaborated inquisitorial structure no less, one geared toward prosecuting "heresy" and imposing the severest of sanctions on it.
the problem with arbitrary categories like "terrorist" may well lie here.
i am not at all sure that the defense of a problematic category is worth ditching due process, ruining lives and destroying political credibility on the part of the regimes that operate in this manner.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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