Crime Cries Out for Justice

We're beginning to notice more than a few articles about people saying the criminals of the previous administration, those who suborned torture and carried it out, those who trampled sacred civil liberties of the American people underfoot, those who elevated the president to the station of Far Eastern potentate, all in the name of "protecting" the American people from terrorism, articles saying that these criminals should not be prosecuted.

Well, pardon me, but I thought if you committed crime, you got punished. Well, indeed you do. Glenn Greenwald reports today* that a homeless guy in Shreveport got 15 years in the slammer for robbing a bank of $100 and then remorsefully turning himself in to the police the next day. Federal law requires 5 years in prison for possession of 5 grams of crack. In Alabama the average term for possession--not selling--of pot is 8.4 years. It goes on and on. The US imprisons far more of its citizens than any other country on earth. One-quarter of all the people in prison in the world are behind bars in the US. It's unbelievable!

And yet we have a passel of limousine liberals like Doris Kearns Goodwin urging us to leave the flaming criminals of the Bush administration alone, people who broke more laws than Carter has liver pills. Don't give them what they deserve. Don't give them what the law requires. Give them a pass because they acted in the 9/11 frame of mind or because . Obviously conservatives and their mouthpieces in Congress are of the same opinion.

Honestly, I don't have any idea what Obama is going to do. But I fear he's going to let these highly-placed scumbags go free so as not to seem vindictive. If this happens, it will be more shameful than the original crimes themselves. And the blood of the 4,000+ Americans dead in Iraq and Afghanistan--dead in the name of "freedom" and the "American way of life"--will then be on his hands as well as those of the evil people he will allow to escape the reach of justice.

Here's Greenwald:

Under all circumstances, arguing that high political officials should be immunized from prosecution when they commit felonies such as illegal eavesdropping and torture would be both destructive and wrong [not to mention, in the case of the latter crimes, a clear violation of a treaty which the U.S. (under Ronald Reagan) signed and thereafter ratified]. But what makes it so much worse, so much more corrupted, is the fact that this "ignore-the-past-and-forget-retribution" rationale is invoked by our media elites only for a tiny, special class of people -- our political leaders -- while the exact opposite rationale ("ignore their lame excuses, lock them up and throw away the key") is applied to everyone else. That, by definition, is what a "two-tiered system of justice" means and that, more than anything else, is what characterizes (and sustains) deeply corrupt political systems. That's the two-tiered system which, for obvious reasons, our political and media elites are now vehemently arguing must be preserved.

*See, Jan 27 "The definition of a 'two-tiered justice system'"