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I guess you don't subscribe to innocent until proven guilty? Even after exhaustive investigation and efforts to prove such guilt?

• mpyne 13y ago
  I believe there is a difference between reality and what the legal system is able to prove. They are necessarily different, as the legal system must apply to society as a whole, which means that we require it to have safeguards that will necessarily reduce its ability to deliver convictions. This doesn't mean that any party not convicted didn't do it; it simply means they were convicted, just as the legal system sometimes manages to deliver convictions on people who were actually innocent. In this case there's no way to even think of how to apply a legal-style investigation except under some kind of quantum parallel-universe model. Exhaustive investigation or not, the fact remains that as soon as the U.S. learned of the leaks they took prompt action to forestall the ability of AQ and the Taliban to act on those leaks, which forever screwed up the possibility of conclusively determining which particular individuals would or would not have been slain. That the threat was mitigated doesn't mean there wasn't an existential threat though, nor does it need a jury of 12 people to demonstrate what is plainly obvious: Loose Lips Sink Ships.