It is clear. If one has a high position of power in this country they can get away with almost anything. That is both past and present. George Bush is obviously a 'war criminal' as described by virtually anyone offering an explanation of what it means to be a 'war criminal'. And yet, the system protects him while throwing 'lesser' persons to the wolves of supposed justice.
And Hillary Clinton has been given a pass by the system as she is deemed too powerful to prosecute for her well known crimes. The question is not whether or not she has done the crime, the question is whether or not we will prosecute her for her crimes.
The banksters who 'ripped us off' really big time are allowed to both keep the 'loot' and to stay out of jail.
And, all the while, the poor person who stole a crumb of food for their desperately starving family, and was caught, is serving maximin time in prison for their dastardly crime.
Unfortunately, the world's people are led by the criminal class who have taken control of everything on the planet and who endanger each and every one of us... and that's the truth !!!
And Hillary Clinton has been given a pass by the system as she is deemed too powerful to prosecute for her well known crimes. The question is not whether or not she has done the crime, the question is whether or not we will prosecute her for her crimes.
The banksters who 'ripped us off' really big time are allowed to both keep the 'loot' and to stay out of jail.
And, all the while, the poor person who stole a crumb of food for their desperately starving family, and was caught, is serving maximin time in prison for their dastardly crime.
Unfortunately, the world's people are led by the criminal class who have taken control of everything on the planet and who endanger each and every one of us... and that's the truth !!!
No Charges for Clinton Expose 'Two-Tiered System of Justice'Former secretary of state seemingly held to different standard than 'low-level, powerless Nobodies-in-DC'
by Deirdre Fulton "Like the Wall Street tycoons whose systemic fraud triggered the 2008 global financial crisis, and like the military and political officials who instituted a worldwide regime of torture, Hillary Clinton is too important to be treated the same as everyone else under the law," writes Glenn Greenwald. The FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of private email servers turned up no recommendation that she be charged with any crime, but it did offer a reminder of how powerful officials—especially the former secretary of state—are seemingly held to a different standard when it comes to rule of law in general and secrecy laws in particular. So argued The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald, who noted after FBI director James Comey's Tuesday announcement that "[f]or low-level, powerless Nobodies-in-DC, even the mere mishandling of classified information – without any intent to leak but merely to, say, work from home – has resulted in criminal prosecution, career destruction and the permanent loss of security clearance." Yet Clinton was protected from such an "extreme, unforgiving, unreasonable, excessive posture toward classified information," Greenwald wrote, "just in time to save [her] presidential aspirations." Indeed, Comey himself admitted the double-standard, saying: "To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now." Despite finding that Clinton and her team were "extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information"—and that the candidate's repeated claims about her email conduct were false—the FBI cited "the context of a person's actions" and a lack of intent to decide against recommending charges. "Looked at in isolation," Greenwald said, "I have no particular objection to this decision." However, he wrote: [T]his case does not exist in isolation. It exists in a political climate where secrecy is regarded as the highest end, where people have their lives destroyed for the most trivial – or, worse, the most well-intentioned – violations of secrecy laws, even in the absence of any evidence of harm or malignant intent. [...] Comey’s announcement also takes place in a society that imprisons more of its citizens than any other in the world by far, for more trivial offenses than any western nation – overwhelmingly when they are poor or otherwise marginalized due to their race or ethnicity. The sort of leniency and mercy and prosecutorial |
While the Chilcot Inquiry has spurred renewed calls for former Prime Minister Tony Blair's impeachment, the American leader continues to evade accountability
by Lauren McCauley Almost as if it were planned, former U.S. President George W. Bush rang in his 70th birthday on Wednesday with a remarkable gift: a reminder of his seemingly eternal impunity for war crimes committed in Iraq and beyond. The long-awaited publication of the Chilcot Inquiry—the UK government's investigation into the lead-up to and execution of the Iraq War—amounted to a searing indictment of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, accusing him of deceiving the public and British Parliament about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction and following the United States blindly into an "illegal" war. And at the very same moment that calls for justice—and Blair's head—echoed across London, Bush celebrated his landmark birthday mountain biking with wounded American veterans. The Chilcot Inquiry did not spare Bush. In fact, the U.S. president was depicted throughout as the aggressor, pushing Blair towards military action in Iraq, despite a failure to win support from the remaining members of the UN Security Council. While many acknowledge that the seven-year inquiry is unlikely to lead to any substantial prosecution of Blair, the fact that former Prime Minister Gordon Brown pursued some measure of truth and reconciliation is notable when compared with the "reckoning," or lack thereof, that Bush has faced for what many say are war crimes. "The former US president most responsible for the foreign policy catastrophe has led a peaceful existence since he left office. Not only has he avoided any post-administration inquiries into his conduct, he has inexplicably seen his approval ratings rise (despite the carnage left in his wake only getting worse)," wrote Guardian columnist Trevor Timm on Wednesday. After taking office, U.S. President Barack Obama dismissed the idea of prosecuting Bush administration officials for the torture conducted under the so-called War on Terror, saying: "This is a time for reflection, not retribution. [...]We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past." As Timm notes, "The only thing close to the Chilcot report in the U.S. was the Senate intelligence committee’s long-delayed investigation on intelligence failures in the lead-up to Iraq, released in 2008. The Democratic-led committee faulted the CIA for massive intelligence failures and the Bush administration for purposefully manipulating intelligence for public consumption." |
For No Positive End: By Their Own Words
by Abby Zimet Seven years and 2.6 million words later, the release of the U.K.'s blistering Chilcot Report lays the blame for the bloody debacle of the Iraq War - its trillions of dollars wasted, thousands of soldiers killed and maimed, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed with millions displaced, and toxic legacy of turmoil and terror - where it belongs: On the deceitful, cynical, arrogant, inept and morally bankrupt heads of Blair and Bush. In statements, Sir John Chilcot mercilessly portrays Blair as what the NY Times dubs “Washington’s poodle,” who obediently joined a war of choice rather than explore peaceful options. On the lethal failures of judgment behind that decision, he adds, "We do not agree that hindsight is required." Blair in his turn expressed his mealy-mouthed "sorrow, regret and apology" it all turned into such a shitshow - or, as summarized on Twitter, "Sorry not sorry." Despite the widespread belief that Blair/Bush/Cheney and their cabal should be charged with war crimes, the report fails to address legal culpability for the catastrophes they all engendered. And of course official America has yet to own any of it - to produce a comparable document calling the Bush/Cheney crimes what they were, or hold anyone other than truth-tellers legally or morally accountable for anything, or even allow any occasion, Rwandan reconciliation style, that might require them to proffer their own pathetic "sorry not sorry," even as their obscene shadows hover in every page of the current unfurling of the war's history. We are left, instead, with the spectacle of a still-leering Cheney on news shows and a still-mindless Bush on his bike, both here, free, unrepentant, hideously untouched. Thus does it fall to the sentient among us and to their victims to name their culpability. To revisit the multitude of lies they told: "Let the warmongers be damned." To listen to the righteous wrath of U.K. families who suffered and continue to suffer because of them, and who quietly but furiously insist the criminals should pay for their crimes. To hear the sister of a dead soldier declare Tony Blair "the world's worst terrorist" and the father of a dead soldier mournfully conclude, "My son died in vain." In Iraq, meanwhile, the news was not of Chilcot. It was of the daily chaos, the unending terror, the latest bombings that killed hundreds of innocent shoppers at a Baghdad market - in a devastated Iraq, a day like any other. The ungodly, untenable truth remains that it has fallen not to the perpetrators but to their broken victims - weeping relatives to wheelchair-bound veterans - to say, "We did that."  |
restraint Comey extended today to Hillary Clinton is simply unavailable for most Americans.
[...] Had someone who was obscure and unimportant and powerless done what Hillary Clinton did – recklessly and secretly install a shoddy home server and worked with Top Secret information on it, then outright lied to the public about it when they were caught – they would have been criminally charged long ago, with little fuss or objection. But Hillary Clinton is the opposite of unimportant. She’s the multi-millionaire former First Lady, Senator from New York, and Secretary of State, supported by virtually the entire political, financial and media establishment to be the next President, arguably the only person standing between Donald Trump and the White House. Like the Wall Street tycoons whose systemic fraud triggered the 2008 global financial crisis, and like the military and political officials who instituted a worldwide regime of torture, Hillary Clinton is too important to be treated the same as everyone else under the law. Shadowproof journalist Kevin Gosztola echoed that charge in his analysis, declaring that "the Clinton case shows how an elite politician running for the highest office in the land can disarm prosecutors simply by being on the cusp of a political party’s nomination. It raises serious questions about how laws against the mishandling of classified information are applied, and it begs for pardons to be issued to any lower-level government officials or military officers, who may have engaged in far less significant misconduct than Clinton but were punished." |
However, all that amounted to was "a couple days of headlines" and "denunciations from the Bush White House (still in office at the time)."
The disparity has never been more clear than now, as the Guardian's Ed Pilkington pointed out, saying that the "findings of the Chilcot inquiry provide a moment to reflect on the fate of the two wartime leaders." "While Bush was the invasion's prime architect, and Blair his all-too eager henchman—lapdog, as half the British people saw him at the time—their relative fortunes since stepping down from office would suggest the opposite relationship," he continued. While the former British prime minister faces "renewed calls for him to be impeached," as Pilkington put it, "Bush, by contrast, has been left largely in peace to pursue his tranquil approach to a post-presidential life." He added: Though far more American military personnel died in Iraq than their British brothers and sisters – 4,497, according to the website antiwar.com – Bush is more likely to be accosted in public these days about his simulated nude appearance in a Kanye West video than about any enduring responsibility for the carnage. And yet, it was Bush’s decision to invade a sovereign nation without a United Nations mandate and with no up-to-date intelligence of an immediate threat by Saddam Hussein to attack the west with weapons of mass destruction. Bush may have had a team of loyal and ideologically driven neocon advisers goading him on – notably vice-president Dick Cheney and then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld – but the decision to dispatch troops was his alone. Indeed, others, including British GQ political correspondent Rupert Myers, also pivoted on the Chilcot release to examine Bush's current state of affairs.  |
Gosztola points to National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, both of whom were "prosecuted zealously" (and in Kiriakou's case, sentenced to 30 months in federal prison) for arguably lesser offenses.
As Jesselyn Radack, attorney and director of national security and human rights for the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program at Expose Facts, told Shadowproof:
It’s a two-tiered system of justice for people who have allegedly mishandled classified information. If you are powerful or politically connected, you have nothing to worry about. But if you’re a low-level whistleblower whose made revelations that the government doesn’t want people to know about torture, about secret surveillance, about drones, that makes you fair game for prosecution and prosecution for espionage.
And as Michael Sainato notes at Observer, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden made a similar argument in 2015, saying in an interview with Al Jazeera that if lower-ranking federal employees did what Clinton did, "they would not only lose their jobs and lose their clearance, they would very likely face prosecution."
Meanwhile, Clinton has "repeatedly attacked" Snowden "for being careless with government information," Juan Cole wrote on Wednesday. "So it is ironic that she has been found guilty of being...careless with government information. She, of course, will suffer no consequences, since she is part of the ruling class."
As for Snowden himself, he responded to Tuesday's announcement with a simple emoji that seemed to say, "ummmm, what?"
In June, the whistleblower tweeted: "Break classification rules for the public's benefit, and you could be exiled. Do it for personal benefit, and you could be President."
As Jesselyn Radack, attorney and director of national security and human rights for the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program at Expose Facts, told Shadowproof:
It’s a two-tiered system of justice for people who have allegedly mishandled classified information. If you are powerful or politically connected, you have nothing to worry about. But if you’re a low-level whistleblower whose made revelations that the government doesn’t want people to know about torture, about secret surveillance, about drones, that makes you fair game for prosecution and prosecution for espionage.
And as Michael Sainato notes at Observer, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden made a similar argument in 2015, saying in an interview with Al Jazeera that if lower-ranking federal employees did what Clinton did, "they would not only lose their jobs and lose their clearance, they would very likely face prosecution."
Meanwhile, Clinton has "repeatedly attacked" Snowden "for being careless with government information," Juan Cole wrote on Wednesday. "So it is ironic that she has been found guilty of being...careless with government information. She, of course, will suffer no consequences, since she is part of the ruling class."
As for Snowden himself, he responded to Tuesday's announcement with a simple emoji that seemed to say, "ummmm, what?"
In June, the whistleblower tweeted: "Break classification rules for the public's benefit, and you could be exiled. Do it for personal benefit, and you could be President."
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