Category Archives: Crime

Trayvon Round II?

If the video of Michael Brown—the unarmed, black teenager who was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri—roughing up and robbing a shopkeeper is authentic, Brown was no gentle giant; he was a brutal bully and worse.

The point being made by the entities Fred Reed dubs “talking heads with bargain-basement IQs,” however, is that the Brown captured by surveillance doing what seemed to come so naturally (intimidating and stealing) relates not at all to the Brown who got shot, because the cop who shot Brown knew nothing of the robbery in which the teen had partaken in the hour prior to his death.

This is not to justify the shooting, but to pose a question: Do we know for sure that the outed policeman did not get information over his car radio about a robbery in the vicinity?

The fact that the alleged perp (Michael Brown) knew he had committed a felony might well have changed the dynamics of the situation. If Brown had consciousness of guilt, he might well have acted in an aggressive manner; “done something an innocent person would not do.”

“The story smells,” writes Fred, who worked the cop beat as a journalist:

Reflect: Every white cop short of the orbit of Neptune knows that if he shoots a black, he faces dismemberment in the media, loss of job and pension, probable criminal charges locally by a publicity-seeking prosecutor, a well-funded civil suit that he can’t afford filed by surviving family members, and trumped-up federal civil-rights charges from an attorney general who doesn’t like whites.

The Tyrant’s Warring Factions

Constitution, Crime, Founding Fathers, John McCain, Media

I’m not quite convinced ordinary individuals should share the nation-wide outrage over the dispute between Congress, on the one hand, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on the other.

What’s it about? Explains AMY GOODMAN of “Democracy Now!”:

The Central Intelligence Agency has admitted its officials spied on a Senate panel probing the agency’s torture and rendition program. An internal probe found 10 CIA employees monitored Senate staffers’ computers. This development comes days after another revelation of CIAspying on Congress emerged. According to McClatchy, the agency has also been spying on emails from whistleblower officials and Congress, triggering fears the CIA has been intercepting the communications of officials who handle whistleblower cases.

This CIA infraction is said to “violate the constitutional separation of powers and may also have been a violation of a federal computer fraud.”

McMussolini is upset. He doesn’t much appreciate any upset in the balance of his power.

Seriously, separation of powers has become nothing but a slogan. Very little remains of the Founder’s constitutional scheme. The people who were supposed to benefit from the dispersion of power inherent in that scheme, now labor under a centralized power.

Isn’t it curious how much fuss is generated by the media-congressional faction when their rights and privileges are messed with? Forgotten in the self-serving din is the spying that goes on against the people. The people themselves forget and become distracted by the whining of those in power.

For all I care, the CIA and Congress can devour each other.

Ironclad Safeguards For … The Sovereign

Barack Obama, Bush, Constitution, Crime

The American constitutional system provides the sovereign with ironclad safeguards against accountability.

As was the case with “W,” the national debt alone is reason enough to impeach the sitting president, Barack Obama. But so high is the constitutional threshold for finding a president guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors—that justice is seldom swift or sure. “The procedure for impeachment,” writes historian Paul Johnson, “is that the House presents and passes an impeachment resolution and the Senate convicts, or not, by a two-thirds vote.” (A History of The American People, p. 504.)

According to InfoPlease, Since 1797, the House of Representatives has impeached sixteen federal officials. These include two presidents, a cabinet member, a senator, a justice of the Supreme Court, and eleven federal judges. Of those, the Senate has convicted and removed seven, all of them judges. Not included in this list are the office holders who have resigned rather than face impeachment, most notably, President Richard M. Nixon.”

“The Small Fry.”

It’s a case of crimes and no punishment.

Although preeminent liberal professor Jonathan Turley disagrees, history attests that the Constitution has proven close to useless in safeguarding natural liberties.

When An Exceptionally ‘Good Country’ Downs A Plane

America, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Ethics, Iran, Reason, Russia

To extrapolate from Dinesh D’Souza’s illogic (explained nicely by Jack Kerwick), when an exceptionally ‘Good Country,’ as the US surely is, downs a plane, that country deserves mitigation, for it is good. In other words, the properties of the crime, which are the same whoever commits it, somehow change, depending on the identity of the perpetrator.

Thus, because he belongs to a good collective, D’Souza, presumably, would diminish the culpability of the “U.S. Navy captain” who shot “Iran Air Flight 655” out of the sky, on July 3, 1988.

“A quarter-century later,” writes Fred Kaplan of Slate, “the Vincennes is almost completely forgotten, but it still ranks as the world’s seventh deadliest air disaster (Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is the sixth) and one of the Pentagon’s most inexcusable disgraces.”

Kaplan compares the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 to “The time the United States blew up a passenger plane—and tried to cover it up.”

… In several ways, the two calamities are similar. The Malaysian Boeing 777 wandered into a messy civil war in eastern Ukraine, near the Russian border; the Iranian Airbus A300 wandered into a naval skirmish—one of many clashes in the ongoing “Tanker War” (another forgotten conflict)—in the Strait of Hormuz. The likely pro-Russia rebel thought that he was shooting at a Ukrainian military-transport plane; the U.S. Navy captain, Will Rogers III, mistook the Airbus for an F-14 fighter jet. The Russian SA-11 surface-to-air missile that downed the Malaysian plane killed 298 passengers, including 80 children; the American SM-2 surface-to-air missile that downed the Iranian plane killed 290 passengers, including 66 children. After last week’s incident, Russian officials told various lies to cover up their culpability and blamed the Ukrainian government; after the 1988 incident, American officials told various lies and blamed the Iranian pilot. Not until eight years later did the U.S. government compensate the victims’ families, and even then expressed “deep regret,” not an apology. …

Read “America’s Flight 17.”