Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
There was a letter to the editor by John Erskine and an article by Irfan Yusuf in today's
Courier Mail that just made me so angry.
John Erskine claims a previous letter writer who wrote that al-Zarqawi deserved a trial by jury has "missed the point". It is Mr Erskine who has missed the point: in my culture (and I assume his also) a person is innocent until proven guilty in a court of competent jurisdiction.
Irfan Yusuf ("Al-Qaeda terrorist chief deserved to die", 12 June, p31 - it doesn't seem to be online anywhere) also misses this point, despite apparently being a lawyer.
No civilised person should accept summary execution without trial, let alone congratulate the killers, as Mr Erskine did.
Although I think Mr Erskine is probably having a sly joke - after all, when he says "Radical Islamists are promoting and fomenting violence and terror to promote their version of reality and religion", he must surely be aware that the sentence is equally true if 'Radical Islamists' is replaced with 'The Bush Administration', if not more so, since the Bushites have
publically acknowledged that they have their own version of reality.
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