Presumption of Guilt

Here's the NYT story on the detention of Donald Vance, who was not only a U.S. citizen, but was working for the FBI tracking abuses.

Expand this treatment to several thousand people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and several secret prisons scattered around Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and gauge the reaction you get from some of our own citizens. The presumption too often is that they must be guilty of something, else they wouldn't have been detained. I've run into it myself in discussion groups -- the automatic assumptoin that all of these people are dangerous terrorists, when the fact point to the conclusion that most of them have been innocent. No suspicion that our own military and intelligence services are incompetent or abusive, or that the administration has given a green light to behavior that we have traditionally condemend in the strongest possible terms. "They're all terrorists."

We have had since our founding a basic principle of law in this country: the accused is innocent until proven guilty. There have always been some who presume guilt, but they've been marginalized. Now they're catered to.

Bush deserves to burn in a Christanist hell for doing that.