Too Big to Jail? Why Kidnapping, Torture, Assassination, and Perjury Are No Longer Crimes in Washing

[unhappycamper]

http://www.juancole.com/2014/04/kidnapping-assassination-washington.html

Too Big to Jail? Why Kidnapping, Torture, Assassination, and Perjury Are No Longer Crimes in Washington
By Juan Cole | Apr. 21, 2014
(By Tom Engelhardt via Tomdispatch.com)

~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 administration’s 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 Agency’s 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.

~snip~

*The destruction of evidence of a crime: To purposely destroy evidence in order to impede a future investigation of possible criminal acts is itself, of course, a crime. We know that such a thing did indeed happen. Jose Rodriguez, Jr., the head of CIA clandestine operations, destroyed 92 videotapes of the repeated waterboardings of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who planned the 9/11 attacks, and alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, “tapes that he had been explicitly told to preserve as part of an official investigation.” The Justice Department investigated his act, but never charged him. He has since defended himself in a book, Hard Measures, saying that he was, in essence, “tired of waiting for Washington’s bureaucracy to make a decision that protected American lives.” He is still free and writing op-eds for the Washington Post defending the interrogation program whose tapes he destroyed.

[rafeh1]

1. jail is for those who smoke marijuana

Us has a criminal justice system . Where innocent until you run out of money is the rule. The result is criminal go free while the poor innocent plea bargain.

[Dragonfli]

2. We no longer have the rule of law in this country

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.