Rules of American justice: a tale of three cases
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/24/rules_of_american_justice_a_tale_of_three_cases/singleton/
I recommend reading the full article, but for those of you who can’t wait, here are the new rules our country operates under:
The Rules of American Justice are quite clear:
(1) If you are a high-ranking government official who commits war crimes, you will receive full-scale immunity, both civil and criminal, and will have the American President demand that all citizens Look Forward, Not Backward.
(2) If you are a low-ranking member of the military, you will receive relatively trivial punishments in order to protect higher-ranking officials and cast the appearance of accountability.
(3) If you are a victim of American war crimes, you are a non-person with no legal rights or even any entitlement to see the inside of a courtroom.
(4) If you talk publicly about any of these war crimes, you have committed the Gravest Crime — you are guilty of espionage – and will have the full weight of the American criminal justice system come crashing down upon you.
I guess I should have made my post yesterday in the tiny roll-back the Supreme Court made on the police state sarcastic, but at that moment I actually felt some tiny shreds of optimism. Of course, that was false optimism, at best, as I mention in the article all they have to do is find some judge to sign off on their warrants and off they go. Judges have become so politicized (well, perhaps that is compared to my rose-tinted reading of middle-of-last-century court cases) that it seems more and more they are incapable of issuing rulings that are grounded in law and it is now quite common to see decisions overturned back and forth as a case winds its way up the food chain.
This last part is the really terrifying/telling part:
Part of the DOJ’s criminal investigation in the Kirakou matter included investigating whether criminal defense lawyers representing GITMO detainees, from the ACLU and elsewhere, committed crimes by attempting to learn of the identity of the CIA agents who tortured their clients (so that they could sue or otherwise hold those torturers accountable: exactly what any competent lawyer should do). Although the DOJ ultimately decided yesterday against indictments of those lawyers, the very fact that the DOJ criminally investigated them at all is self-evidently dangerous. About that investigation, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero told Savage that “it — and the Obama-era leak investigations more broadly — had had a ‘chilling effect on defense counsel, government whistle-blowers, and journalists’.” That, of course, is exactly why its purpose.
I really need to get a copy of 1984 so I can get a clear vision for where this is all going.
