I sincerely appreciate your perspective. I have trouble imagining what Berlin was like at that time. I also have trouble imagining how someone who lived through that would approve of the government administering their health care. You have my best wishes that your leaders remain benevolent.
You might be surprised, but from what I know, public healthcare and social welfare nets are among the things even a large majority of East Germans believes were the few good things in communist East Germany.
This is not a matter of guilt or innocence. Let me give you my perspective this way:
If I suspect that you murdered my brother, as a human right, I owe you the presumption of innocence unless/until I can prove you are guilty.
If I suspect that you and a group of your friends present an immediate mortal danger to my brother, as a human right, I owe it to my brother to get any information you have out of you in order to save his life.
Aha. And who has the authority to do that? You could just point your finger at random people and claim "they are an immediate mortal danger to my brother", and they get crushed and locked away indefinitely. Or the government could. Who gives you or the government the right to do that? When you are not into mob huntings, drumheads and witch hunts, you need to present proof before you can hold someone, or even punish someone, and give the according person the right to defend himself. But in case of those extralegally held in Gitmo or Bagram, nobody has ever presented any solid proof in a fair trial. Probably they are even denied fair trials just because of that: Because the government knows very well they have no solid proof whatsoever against them.
And imagine it from another perspective: You are not conspiring against someone's brother, you just have a funny beard, and a guy doesn't like you. Then he points at you and your friends and claims: "They are a mortal danger to my brother!". Maybe he even honestly believes that, and you were indeed in the wrong place so that you are suspicious, and only you yourself know you are innocent. Or the government points at you. Without any proof. Would you think it's fair then they can arrest you, hold you for years, although they don't have the slightest proof, deny you a fair trial and torture you? Would you think that's just fine when you get locked away and tortured, just because someone, or the government makes such a bold claim?
Or think of a corrupt government. The President may think "uh, the new poll numbers look bad, I need to do something. Hey! Why don't we just extralegally arrest some random people? When the public learns that, they will believe us those arrested are terrorists anyway, and my poll numbers will rise again, because this gives the impression that I'm tough on terror. Let's do it!" And said President then orders the CIA to kidnap a bunch of random, sinister looking people from the streets of some other country. If there is proof against them, or if they are actually guilty, doesn't matter. The President wins anyway -- he looks tough on terror and his poll numbers rise. The question whether they are innocent will not matter -- they are denied fair trials and the right to defend themselves, so we will never know if they are guilty or innocent. So this will not backfire on the President either.
Another nice thing about "harsh interrogations" or "torture": Has it ever occured to you that this is not a good means to get information from people, but that it is rather a tool for the government to make innocent people sign any false confession the government wants them to make? Because that is what happens to innocent people who get tortured: They will sign anything, even admit things they haven't done, just to make the pain stop. This is why torture was the first choice of Nazis, communists or Saddam's thugs. Do you really want our governments to step in their footsteps? Confessions that stem from torture are not accepted as proof by any genuinely free court in the free world, for good reason.
Also, don't forget we're talking about reality here, not some fictional Hollywood scenario from an exaggerated television series where good looking secret agents need to prevent a ticking bomb from going off and thus torture bad guys who are thoroughly evil, as you can see on first glimpse.
All these points are the very reason why we bother having a legal system in the first place: Without it, there would not be justice, and mere suspicion would destroy the lives of innocent people. That's what we had in the Dark Ages -- witchhunts. That's what we had in regimes like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or Saddam's Iraq. No, in a free country, you cannot, never, arrest a suspect unless you present proof and evidence against him. In case of immediate danger, the police can hold that person, but not indefinitely, but after 24 hours, a judge has to release an arrest warrent, and you have to put him on trial eventually. If the proof is not substantial enough, or evidence to the contrary can be presented on court, you have to acquit the suspect and he has to be considered innocent, even if that means that some guilty people get away.
But that's the price of freedom. Fascist tyranny is probably much safer than a free society, in terms of crime: Just shoot all of the dozen suspects, the one who did it will be among them, too bad for the other 11. But in a free society, we have to rather let one guilty get away, before we convict and punish one innocent person. That's what freedom is.
If we ignore these most basic legal standards, there is arbitrariness. And many innocent people would get in the wheels and crushed by a government that is above the law. It could be you, it could be me. That's why you should support legal process, fair trials and independent judicary.
It amazes me time and again that so many people, even in the historically most free country on this planet, don't seem to understand these basic thoughts -- because when there is no law and fair legal system, you don't even need to begin talking about freedom.
