Well Im looking for a better rationale than that. if you watch documentaries such as ‘the power of nightmares’ by Adam Curtis you see that the US arrested many innocent people, who were later shown in their trial (or at times after conviction) to be innocent. That doesnt mean though that the motivation of the intelligence agencies is something other than preventing attacks based on their estimation of the threat.
What is absolutely wrong is that these people have no recourse to a court, a trial, somewhere they can defend themselves. It is shameful especially when we know how often innocent people get arrested even by half decent law enforcers, how inefficient, lazy and corrupt our own intelligence services can be, and how hand-wavey descriptions of potential terrorists are. What I dont like is
a) automatic attribution of innocence to those picked up. They should be viewed as suspects.
b) unsubstantiated attribution of a desire to keep random people indefinitely, when clearly these people are surely a commodity that would give whoever ends up with them a net economic loss. I do not envision that there is even much of a gain to possess these people as slave labour for example.
c) suggestions that the people collecting the ‘deer’ are masochists motivated by things such as a desire to hurt innocent people/Muslims. this sort of good/evil type dichotomy of the world discredits your argument, erases complexity, and opens you upto to simple rebuttals.
What I consider better arguments are things like
a) the govts have no legal framework under which to prosecute suspected terrorists, who are often arrested pre-emptively or under conditions of fighting, and therefore the evidence against them is more tenuous than that which might be collected during a crime investigation. prosecuting them would mean risking a large number of terrorists to go free, and therefore the government makes the utilitarian calculation that X number of innocents is a price worth paying to detain Y number of terrorists.
b) the govts/agencies abused their powers in detaining and ‘interrogating’ people they thought were suspects, and revealing that would be politically damaging.
c) the govts created a political atmosphere where arresting terrorists was good for your career (or bank account), and therefore intelligence agencies were incentivized to inflate cases against people who wouldnt otherwise have been arrested.
d) all of the above