Innocent Until Proven Guilty Already Gone

In his post directly below this one James Otteson rightly criticizes an aspect of plans to eliminate tax deductions for companies that make money overseas. He quotes an AP article which says "Obama also planned to ask Congress to crack down on tax havens and implement a major shift in the way courts view guilt. Under Obama's proposal, Americans would have to prove they were not breaking U.S. tax laws by sending money to banks that don't cooperate with tax officials. It essentially would reverse the long-held assumption of innocence in U.S. courts.”

However, there is no major shift here because asset forfieture laws which supposedly target those who violate drug prohibition have already eliminated the American legal idea of innocent until proven guilty. Too many people take the attitude that I do not use any of the currently illegal drugs so why should I care about drug prohibition. Well here is yet another example of a pernicious concept developed for the war on people who use certain kinds of drugs being applied to everyone. And, because those being punished before or without even a trial are subhuman users of the"evil drugs" many do not even ackowldege this prior twisting of legal principle.

I would also like to add that demands to prove a negative have been the driving force behind our foreign policy since 2003, when we made the impossible requirement to fulfill, that Saddam Hussein prove he had no WMDs, to avoid invasion. Before the war Hussein released a massive amount of documentation showing he had destroyed the weapons in question but that was still not enough to save the lives of over 4000 American soldiers. We are now doing the same thing to Iran with regards to a nuclear weapons program that our own intelligence services said in 2007 did not exist.