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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhy Kidnapping, Torture, Assassination, and Perjury Are No Longer Crimes in Washington
http://www.alternet.org/visions/why-kidnapping-torture-assassination-and-perjury-are-no-longer-crimes-washington***SNIP
Seven Free Passes for the National Security State
With Cartwright as a possible exception, the members of the national security state, unlike the rest of us, exist in what might be called post-legal America. They know that, no matter how heinous the crime, they will not be brought to justice for it. The list of potentially serious criminal acts for which no one has had to take responsibility in a court of law is long, and never tabulated in one place. Consider this, then, an initial run-down on seven of the most obvious crimes and misdemeanors of this era for which no one has been held accountable.
*Kidnapping: After 9/11, the CIA got into kidnapping in a big way. At least 136 terror suspects and possibly many more (including completely innocent people) were kidnapped off the streets of global cities, as well as from the backlands of the planet, often with the help of local police or intelligence agencies. Fifty-four other countries were enlisted in the enterprise. The prisoners were delivered either into the Bush administrations secret global system of prisons, also known as black sites, to be detained and mistreated, or they were rendered directly into the hands of torturing regimes from Egypt to Uzbekistan. No American involved has been brought to court for such illegal acts (nor did the American government ever offer an apology, no less restitution to anyone it kidnapped, even those who turned out not to be terror suspects). One set of CIA agents was, however, indicted in Italy for a kidnapping and rendition to Egypt. Among them was the Agencys Milan station chief Robert Seldon Lady. He had achieved brief notoriety for overseeing a la dolce vita version of rendition and later fled the country for the United States. Last year, he was briefly taken into custody in Panama, only to be spirited out of that country and back to safety by the U.S. government.
*Torture (and other abuses): Similarly, it will be no news to anyone that, in their infamous torture memos, officials of the Bush Justice Department freed CIA interrogators to take the gloves off and use what were euphemistically called enhanced interrogation techniques against offshore prisoners in the Global War on Terror. These techniques included waterboarding, once known as the water torture, and long accepted even in this country as a form of torture. On coming to office, President Obama rejected these practices, but refused to prosecute those who practiced them. Not a single CIA agent or private contractor involved was ever charged, no less brought to trial, nor was anyone in the Bush Justice Department or the rest of an administration which green-lighted these practices and whose top officials reportedly saw them demonstrated in the White House.
To be accurate, a single member of the national security state has gone to prison thanks to the CIAs torture program. That was John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent who tortured no one, but offended the Obama administrations by turning whistleblower and going public about Agency torture. He is now serving a 30-month prison sentence for disclosing a covert operatives name to a reporter. In other words, the only crime that could be prosecuted in connection with the Agency's torture campaign was one that threatened to let the American public know more about it.
GoneFishin
(5,217 posts)"John Kiriakou ... tortured no one, but offended the Obama administrations by turning whistleblower ... about Agency torture".
gratuitous
(82,849 posts)But somewhere along the line, we got so scared that we decided that very bad persons - designated as such by nobody knows - were so very bad that we couldn't trust our criminal justice procedures to try them, convict them, and punish them. As always, there is a certain strain in our society and our government ready and waiting to move into that vortex of fear for its own secret ends.
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)That would be in 2000 when the supreme court faked the results of a presidential election in Bush V Gore.
The nation has never recovered from that single criminal act. Many individual criminal acts went into that election theft including MASSIVE election fraud by the Florida Republicans. But that supreme court decision was the nail in the coffin of a nation of laws.
truebrit71
(20,805 posts)Dragonfli
(10,622 posts)Sure, you can go to prison for stealing food if you are a serf, you can go to prison for growing a plant even. But the rule of law only applies to peasants. If you are a high government official, a thug doing their dirty work (rape, murder, torture, kidnapping, anything really) or are a billionaire that profits those in high public office (stealing billions in money or real estate, killing people by denying procedures and medicines as the "gatekeepers of health", or imprisoning people for the sake of profit) you are above the law, the law simply doesn't apply to you.
Once when these same facts were true in a monarchy that made the same distinctions regarding royalty and serf classes, there were those that rebelled against such an immune royalty which were allowed to abuse the people, steal everything from them (there homes, their health, even their lives) and face no consequences. Revolutions were fought and promises were made by the victors, Promises such as the rule of law applies to all or it applies to none. Promises that now ring hollow as the champions of a fair government slowly over time devolved back into what was and what always had been, a system of an elite few above laws possessing nearly all the wealth while laws were used exclusively against their victims - the majority that go hungry and grow sick under the rule of that elite.
We have come full circle now. Now it is common for a financial and political higher class to never have to fear laws that would imprison any commoner and we are supposed to accept this, cheer it even as the lord of our castle defeats the lord of some other castle. But the bread and circuses grow ever more scarce. The illusions of fairness ever more transparent, and the cruelties ever more severe.
If we are to follow laws that do not apply to our masters. If our masters are given the fruits of all of our labors while we search our dirt floors for crumbs as they laugh in their mansions discussing ways to extract even more from their impoverished serfs. Perhaps we are less than serfs, perhaps we are dogs that now only lick the hands of the masters that beat us. Perhaps the dream of shared prosperity and happiness has finally died within our hearts and our minds.
Perhaps we deserve our fate because we so meekly, even proudly in some cases accept it.
GoneFishin
(5,217 posts)awoke_in_2003
(34,582 posts)Dragonfli
(10,622 posts)awoke_in_2003
(34,582 posts)about to rec.
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)[center][font size=10]IT'S THE FEAR.[/font][/center]
- And there's no reason for it. We could stop this tomorrow if we wanted.
Just stop. And watch it fall apart without us.
quinnox
(20,600 posts)Domestic surveillance is also part of this, we must monitor the citizens, for their own protection.
Those who say otherwise are all Edward Snowden sympathizers who probably are un-American and communist and a terrorist to boot, just like he is!
BelgianMadCow
(5,379 posts)that you posted this already, though I found the piece at Naked Capitalism, with the same source of course.
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)...lacking any originality and any cerebral capabilities of their own, they've decided to take George Orwell's novel 1984 and bring it to life.
Even now these numbnuts lack any intelligence or ability of their own and must cheat off someone else's paper in order to create their New World Order.
- Well, it ain't new assholes, it's George's.......
K&R
''All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.''
~George Orwell
BelgianMadCow
(5,379 posts)Same source as OP
WillyT
(72,631 posts)struggle4progress
(118,301 posts)claiming that waterboarding was a wonderful and effective way to obtain so-called intelligence
A number of his statements on that subject turned out to be pure fabrication and should be regarded merely as instances of the pro-torture propaganda so popular in the Bush era
As a result of his pro-torture propaganda efforts, Kiriakou began something of media celebrity and a popular commentator on the subject: a generic spiel from Kiriakou involved claiming great moral anguish regarding torture, then to "balance" that by reasserting that torture worked extraordinarily well, with added remarks that the extraordinary circumstances facing the US had left us with no choice except to resort to torture, that he saw no real alternative, and that he still thought it had been the right course of action
Kiriakou really enjoyed the media spotlight and eventually he ran afoul of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, and in the end he pleaded guilty to violations of that act
msanthrope
(37,549 posts)It's as if google and history simply don't exist here.
struggle4progress
(118,301 posts)of actually doing class analysis and organizing work) apparently believe that the way forward involves nothing more than promoting cynicism; some by the libertarian crowd that hopes to increase the third-party voting block; and some (I think) by conservatives whose current tactic is attack Obama by any means. That last group isn't always recognized when it appears, but it may be relevant to notice that Kiriakou has had a large conservative following, and that rightwing Liberty University was one of his regular lecture stops
daleanime
(17,796 posts)malaise
(269,067 posts)Putin. Do as I say but not as I do does not work when you show up on some one else's border with the same BS tactics. Bushco destroyed US credibility and those drone strikes aren't helping. The US and NATO do not get to make up rules are they go along and hold others to the standards of international law - not after illegal wars and torture - not after the kidnappings and drone strikes.
Our planet has been fugged by the greedy...democracy and freedom my ass - it's oligarchs looting all others by any means necessary,