Ok, a couple of military prosecutors have resigned in protest over alleged unfairness in the upcoming prosecutions of terror detainees in GITMO.

We don’t have full info about the already-completed investigations that occurred prior to the resignations. The two prosecutors chose to resign when the investigation apparently resulted in no meaningful changes.

In commenting about the resignations, commentators of the various persuasions will do various things with this story.

What will I do with it? I will use the story as a springboard to talk about the philosophical issue of spinning news items one way or the other, ignoring them or overly-emphasizing them, depending on your persuasion.

In other words, I’m gonna talk about doing too much with too little info.

Commentators SHOULD take a reasonable justifiable position, and rightly state that we don’t know enough to form opinions yet. For instance, we don’t know if the two prosecutors were just disgruntled officers who were looking for a way out of GITMO, or if they were liberal activists who were twisting and distorting in order embarass the gorvernment, or if they were real whistleblowers about a real conspiracy to railroad detainees.

UNTIL we know more, it would be safest to be reserved in our comments.

BUT let’s look at what the vituperative political-entertainment commentators will ACTUALLY DO with the story.

I predict that the RIGHT will attack the two prosecutors for lying or for being disingenuous. The RIGHT will defend hard against anything that might embarass Bush. The Right will lack real evidence to support their contentions, but they will claim that the “investigation” proved that the allegations were not well founded.

The Right will ignore the possibility that the “investigation” could have been conducted as a white-wash, in order to “find” that the allegations had no merit.

The hard LEFT will seize upon the accusations and grant instant full credibility to the two prosecutors, in the exact same way as the RIGHT granted full credibility to the Swift Boaties.

And neither the Right nor the Left truly possesses enough information to be able to do more than speculate and hope. And yet, the spinwits will present their opinions with fire and brimstone certainty as if preaching biblical truths from the pulpit.

It kinda makes me sick, the way we are fed garbage by commentators.

The fact is that we don’t know enough facts to render a judgment about the two prosecutors and their allegations.

As long as we label our comments as speculation or hopes and dreams, we are being honest.

If you hear commentators judging the two prosecutors, consider the motives of the commentators and play devil’s advocate and ask what assumptions the commentators must be making.

GITMO prosecutors quit - from Marine Corps Times
Two quit jobs as Gitmo
tribunal prosecutors

By Robert Burns
Associated Press

The Pentagon acknowledged on Monday that two former members of the military team handling prosecutions of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, Cuba, had alleged last year that the trial system was rigged in favor of the government.

Officials said, however, that the prosecutors%u2019 charges had been thoroughly reviewed and dismissed as unfounded. While declining to reveal specifics of the allegations, a Pentagon spokesman said an investigation determined they were %u201Cmuch ado about nothing.%u201D

The allegations by Air Force Maj. John Carr, who was then a captain, and Air Force Maj. Robert Preston were first reported by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times in their Monday editions. The newspapers said they obtained internal e-mails written by Carr and Preston that detailed their allegations.
[. . .]