Barney Frank: “I understand the lack of compassion for terrorists. I share much of it. But this is not about terrorists. This is about…”

“I understand the lack of compassion for terrorists. I share much of it. But this is not about terrorists. This is about people accused of terrorism. And there may be human realms where infallibility is a valid concept, not in the arresting of people and certainly not when this is done in the fog of war. Have we not had enough examples of error, of people like the recent case, to our embarrassment, of a man sent to Syria to be tortured by the United States wrongly; of Captain Yee; of Mr. Mayfield in Oregon? Have we not had enough examples of error to understand that you need to give people accused of this terrible crime a way to prove that the accusations were not true? That is what is at risk here. I believe that the law enforcement people of America and the Armed Forces of America are the good guys. But they are not the perfect guys. They are not people who don't make mistakes, particularly acting as they do under stress. It is a terrible thing to contemplate that this bill will allow people to be locked up indefinitely with no chance to prove that they were locked up in error. We should not do it.”