The Rich and Powerful are protected by the Rich and Powerful

Dear Friends,

Two items in the news yesterday, combined with the Republican presidential debate and the cold, rainy weather we are having, have left me feeling very sad about the state of my country and what we do compared to what we say we stand for, i.e. our hypocrisy.

I was dismayed by the assassination of Osama bin Laden when it occurred concluding in a blog post in May 2011 (here)

Justice was not done by assassinating Osama bin Laden. Revenge was taken, plain and simple. Justice is a critical and core value of a great society. Vengeance has no place in one.

So when The New York Times reported (here) on the legal justification for assassinating Osama bin Laden, it raised a painful memory for me.  At best the legal justification was a real stretch.  I found this sentence in the article particularly disturbing.

The legal analysis offered the administration wide flexibility to send ground forces onto Pakistani soil without the country’s consent, to explicitly authorize a lethal mission, to delay telling Congress until afterward, and to bury a wartime enemy at sea.

The lawyers said that the United States could violate the sovereignty of another country, explicitly authorize the killing of a person without due process, not tell Congress and violate the person's religion by burying him at sea.

Every one of those conclusions is doubtful.  The four lawyers even went to the extreme position that
the President was obligated to follow domestic law but not international law if a covert action were involved.

Consider another scenario.  Dick Cheney is a war criminal because he lead the planning and execution of an invasion of Iraq on false pretenses, causing the death of thousands of people and is continuing to espouse similar activities. So the Iraqi government decides to send its forces into the United States without asking permission from the United States to kill Cheney and dump his body at sea.  The only difference between the two scenarios is that the powerful get to write the rules and history.

The second item was the vote by the Parliament of the European Union to urge its member states to drop all charges against Edward Snowden, treat him as a “whistle-blower and international human rights defender” and shield him from extradition and rendition. While the message is important and powerful, it is not legally binding.  This courageous vote by the European Union stands in bright contrast to the hypocrisy of the Obama Administration.

The Obama Administration insists that Edward Snowden violated the law by disclosing the illegal activities that were being conducted by the Untied States government, and he probably did violate the law.  It is also clear that Vice President Cheney and President George W. Bush violated both domestic and international law in connection with torture, spying on US citizens and invading Iraq under knowingly false pretenses.  If President Obama insists on prosecuting Edward Snowden, then to be consistent, intellectually honest and moral, he must also prosecute Bush and Cheney.  Since it is very clear that he will never do that, he has no moral authority to prosecute Edward Snowden.

President Obama's lawyers can find legal justification for assassinating people, both American citizens (see my post from April 2010 here) and others without due process, violating the sovereignty of other nations, and spying on American citizens, but surprisingly cannot find any reason to prosecute the war crimes committed by the the highest members of the United States government.  We see the same rule applied when it comes to Wall Street crimes.  The big corporations get fines but none of the leaders are criminally prosecuted, just the occasional little guy.  

The rich and powerful are protected by the rich and powerful.  That should never be the rule in my country, the United States of America.

Thanks for reading and please comment,

The Unabashed Liberal