Checkpoints

Every expert I've seen speak to what happened to the car with the released Italian hostage has said the same thing -- the Italians failed to coordinate with the Americans. Nonetheless, the incident has raised, once again, the question of civilian deaths at US military checkpoints.

Here's the bottom line: there are calls for making checkpoints safer on the margins (larger signs, bigger, brighter lights) and those all sound like good ideas. But the real heart of the matter is that the troops have clearly been told to act as if any vehicle that fails to slow down after a certain number of warnings is hostile. That's where they place presumption: the risk of letting through a suicide bomber is greater than the risk of fatally shooting civilians.

And that's what's really upsetting the critics. They want presumption placed the other way. They want the troops to act as if the risk of shooting civilians, fatally or not, is a greater risk than letting through a suicide bomber or a drive-by shooter.

The dispute is absolutely that simple.

Presumption is all about what risk you believe is greater. (In the American criminal justice system, we've decided that the risk of locking up an innocent man is greater than the risk of freeing a guilty one, for example.) The military has decided which risk matters more, and the critics aren't happy with that choice.

You can be sure, by the way, that if the military flipped and put presumption the other way, the press would be all over them for that choice, too.

Comments

[George]

The critics really don't want to deal with "presumptions." They want favorable outcomes, which in practice means the absence of tragic outcomes. Their reasoning, such as it is, doesn't extend beyond first-order events.

[Huggy]

An innocent man who fights the Criminal Justice Business is very likely to be locked up longer than a criminal who has experience with the discretion given prosecution.