Category Archives: Crime

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.

Related:
“Liberal law professor: Obama is the danger.”
“Five myths about impeachment.”

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.”

The Elephant In The Pistorius Courtroom

Crime, Free Speech, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Race, Racism, South-Africa, Sport

Now on WND is “The Elephant In The Pistorius Courtroom,” in which I speak to philosopher Dan Roodt, Ph.D., about two recent show trials: that of blade-runner Oscar Pistorius and that of the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, Donald Sterling. Dr. Roodt is a noted Afrikaner activist, author, literary critic and director of PRAAG. He is the author of the polemical essay, “The Scourge of the ANC.”

An excerpt:

ILANA MERCER: “There’s an elephant in the courtroom in which Oscar Pistorius is being tried for the murder of girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. It is the unidirectional, black-on-black and black-on-white violent crime in South Africa. The fear of being butchered was likely behind the blade runner’s irrational, irresponsible actions. I had hoped that Pistorius would speak up. For all his privilege, Pistorius knows the rapacity and invincibility of the criminal class in his country. Like every other Afrikaner, he knew in his gut what infiltrating gangs would do to a legless Boer. The world is praising the proceedings in that court. However, “making sport of a caged animal that has confessed” is how a South African reader described this Colosseum. What do you think?

DAN ROODT: I largely agree with that. One of the columnists on our Praag.org site described the trial as a “canned hunt and a legal travesty.” Most people watching it probably do not know that only 8 percent of murder cases in South Africa result in a conviction, so killers have a 92 percent chance of literally getting away with murder! South Africa is both the murder and especially the rape capital of the world. Usually the statistics are massaged in such a way that only murder proper, called “first-degree murder” in the United States, is included in the absolute number of murders. But if one also counts other homicides with a lesser culpability, we are the world champions, even above India’s 43,000 homicides. But, of course, India has over 1 billion people, whereas we have just over 50 million. Even for first-degree murder, we have more of those per year (16,000) than the U.S. (14,000) which has six times our population.

Regarding the court procedures, Pistorius is spending a lot of money on his legal team and the state is using an experienced Afrikaner prosecutor, Gerrie Nel. However, there has been large-scale affirmative action applied to the appointment of judges, so that many of them lack the knowledge of the law and the experience to do their job properly. In many cases, black offenders, especially, get off very lightly and in practice do not serve more than ten years for first-degree murder.

The government is also applying pressure on lawyers to apply affirmative action in their own ranks as most of the top-level senior lawyers or advocates, as we call them, are still white. …”

Read the rest. “The Elephant In The Pistorius Courtroom” is now on WND.