The innocent tomatoes

Last week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that its June 7th warning about salmonella-contaminated tomatoes was completely mistaken.

There was never anything wrong with the tomatoes.

The FDA said the reported cases of salmonella poisoning that had been blamed on tomatoes may have been caused by peppers, or possibly cilantro.

Nobody got sick from tomatoes, except the tomato farmers who lost an estimated $100 million dollars when the FDA issued its terrifying warning that contaminated tomatoes could be fatal to children and the elderly.

Certainly the FDA is doing its very best to protect the public, and surely a lot of well-meaning, reasonably competent people looked at the data before making a mistake and causing catastrophic harm to farmers who were totally blameless.

Speaking of catastrophic harm, officials at the Department of Justice just agreed to pay former Army scientist Steven Hatfill almost $6 million to settle his claim that they violated his privacy, and destroyed his life, by telling the press he was a "person of interest" in the still-unsolved 2001 anthrax-in-the-mail case.

Dr. Hatfill was as innocent as a tomato.

So was Richard Jewell, whose life was destroyed when law enforcement officials told the media he was "the focus" of the FBI's investigation into a bomb at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

Certainly the FBI is staffed by well-meaning and reasonably competent people who were trying their best to protect the public from danger.

Sometimes well-meaning people make mistakes, especially when they're afraid they might be blamed for a lot of people dying.

On Monday the first U.S. war crimes trial since World War Two will begin at Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, and last week U.S. Judge Thomas F. Hogan ordered the Justice Department to stop stalling and give the Guantanamo detainees their day in court after more than six years of detention. "The time has come to move these forward," Judge Hogan told Justice Department lawyers, "Set aside every other case that's pending in the division and address this case first."

Officials in the Bush administration are not happy. They have labored to keep the detainees out of the U.S. courts, where they say there is a risk that dangerous terrorists might be released on some legal technicality. The administration says the president has a duty to protect the American people from terror attacks.

Actually, the president's oath is to protect and defend the Constitution, not the public safety, but let's not go off on a tangent.

The point here is that sometimes the government gets it wrong.

The reason our system of justice has all those "technicalities," like habeas corpus and the right to confront witnesses, is that the Constitution guarantees an accused person the opportunity to make the government prove its case in a public trial. Otherwise the power of government can too easily destroy the lives of innocent people.

Even if you believe, as some judges do, that the Guantanamo detainees are not entitled to the protections of the Constitution, you have to recognize that sometimes the government makes horrible mistakes. For the Guantantamo prisoners, there will be no crusading reporter or Innocence Project lawyer to dig out the facts and free them one day. The war on terror is shrouded in secrecy, and that means errors can go undetected forever.

So bear in mind, when the trials of the Guantanamo detainees finally begin, that we don't know whether any of the prisoners have been wrongly accused.

They might be terrorists.

They might be tomatoes.


Copyright 2008

Editor's note: You may be interested in the earlier post, "The trouble with waterboarding."

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