Notes on Civil Justice and CNN

Obviously there is nothing in civil justice that has the slightest impact on Trump's criminal and psychopathic behavior. He turned around from being convicted for "sexual abuse", but we know that really means rape without overt penetration by his slimy little penis, and on public television attacked and demeaned this rape victim again. He will deflect, delay, and deny as always. The worse that happens is that he pays $5M. Which he can easily steal from his supporters by lying to them, as he has so often over the last 5-7 years.  Not quite a complete waste of time, but not sufficient to affect the maniac's attempt to seize power and destroy the country.  The lesson is that it has to be a criminal indictment and he has to go to jail. 

CNN knew exactly what they were doing when they put Trump on air for their so-called "town hall" with nothing but his supporters in the audience. They knew what he would say and he said them. He verbally abused the woman he had sexually attacked, he all but confessed other crimes, he repeated his lies, he was given an hour of air time in a major national market. CNN is culpable in his obstruction of justice and his attempt to destroy this country and install a fascist government. There are no principles of free speech at stake here. Nothing keeps him from buying an hour of airtime. (Good luck calculating what that would cost).

The supreme court and various appeals courts are a joke having been destroyed by the Republicans. Term limits or some other remedy are required.  God knows Thomas won't resign without being forced. The Dems should have raised the debt limit when they had the ability to do so. This situation is essentially their fault as they allowed the Republicans to hold the country hostage. I guess they were trying to be bipartisan. Sorry, sarcasm.

Its too late to put him in jail, I doubt the feds will even try.

I certainly am not a fan of CNN.

I realize that nothing I say here is the least bit original, nor will it have the slightest impact.  I write these posts to blow off steam and because it helps me remember what I thought at the time the post was written.

The Heavyweight Fight of the Century!

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Ladies and Gentlemen!  Your attention please!  The fight you have all been waiting for!  In this corner we have the world champion bully, traitor and narcissist, Donald Trump!  And in this corner we have the plucky idealist, Merrick Garland!  Who will win?  

 

At last, yes you thought that this day would never come.  The Donald is such a nutty boy and his followers so incredibly loyal and stupid that they seemed to be able to overrun any of that vaunted "constitutional protection" we have all heard about all our lives.  But maybe not so much, especially with the completely opportunistic and shameless Republican party running interface for this piece of garbage.

What will happen?

Image "borrowed" from MSNBC

 

 

The SDNY Did Not Fail to Indict Trump

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When the SDNY did not indict Donald Trump and his obviously corrupt Trump Organization, it was not a failure of "justice".  This is the way our system is intended to work.

 

Its not that the justice system failed, its that the American people, by which I mean progressives (possibly progressive democrats), are stupid and unrealistic to believe that it ever would happen based on what they should have learned about our system by now. A few of these "lessons" include, the SDNY is no more capable of taking on a corrupt crime organization like Trump than they are to take on the Genovese family. The job of the SDNY is to get convictions based on the laws that the corrupt legislature has put in place to victimize the small fish and protect their friends. Also, the job of the SDNY is not to take any risks involving high profile cases and by definition all high profile cases are therefore excluded.  The Department of Justice is no more about "justice" than the Department of Defense is about "defense" or Homeland Security is about "security". There is no justice in the USA except more or less by accident. 

 

It is well understood by political scientists (or at least some political scientists) that when a political system fails to provide such "public goods" as a functioning and legitimate justice system, a practical way to change the constitution, and a peaceful and legitimate way to choose one's representatives, that the system is very likely to experience a revolution and that assassination is seen as a legitimate tool of political change.  But America has always used assassination for political purposes. See, for example, Huey Long, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, JFK and RFK.  Under the circumstances, some would say that the only way to achieve minimum justice and the will of the majority in this country would be to assassinate Trump.

 

This is the lesson of history.  This is the American Way.

 

 

 

 

https://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/

Where is Wilford Brimley When We Need Him?

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Dear REDACTED,

How did we get here? That you would suggest that I was overly simplistic about matters of principle? Me? I merely want to remind my friends what is at stake here. This is not your everyday serial rape of children by rich people in public flying their powerful friends, like Trump or Clinton, around to do so, and then making a deal with the Florida DA to avoid any semblance of justice or compensation for the victims. As if the law were a joke to be flouted unless you were black or poor. This is nothing trivial like that. This is a series of crimes against the republic, not one crime (and I mean that in some sort of literal, legalistic sense) but a whole series of them. You say its more complicated than I realize, but I am trying to communicate, and failing, that I think that I know very well what a clusterfuck this is, even if I may indeed be ignorant of the details of what the SDNY or the DOJ may face. My response is that this is why they get paid the big bucks. And now, having been paid, many of us wish them to do their goddamn job. I am certainly not right about everything. I never thought in a million years that Trump would, again in plain sight, try to overturn the election in which Gore, excuse me, I meant to say Biden, obviously won. That he would on network television incite his followers to overthrow the constitution, attack the Congress and attempt to murder the leading Democrats in the House, defecate in the halls of congress, both literally and figuratively, and then people would say, "we must not overreact". You have got to be kidding me. I want my money back.

At the end of "No Sudden Moves" by Soderbergh, the Aldrick character says "They have eyes but they just cant see".

Hollywood is at fault. Yes, the glamourous and rewarding motion picture industry lied to me. Well, some of them did. I guess we all see what we want to see. I am a goofy idealist who ignored Hammett and Chandler and without realizing it, believed that it wasnt that bleak, that justice would be done. I am a fool. A naive idiot. Instead I believed Brimley in that fabulous courtroom drama, Absence of Malice (1981), that completely goofy Paul Newman and Sally Fields melodrama nominally about the freedom of the press in the form of Sally Fields as she attempts to increase newspaper readership and bring down Paul Newman with the help of an ambitious "jew lawyer" from the DOJ.   Then in a nearly perfect justice ex machina, Wilford Brimley, cast as the aw shucks US assistant attorney general, sweeps in like an "Old Testament" Angel of the LORD and smites the wicked.  

 

Brimley in Absence of Malice (1981)

Brimley starts off the show here (in low quality youtube video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btqBJJF2yvE

And Newman and Brimley finish it off here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMj3uqFKG84

What a fool I have been. There is no Brimley and there is no Justice. I have been lied to and those of us who pinned our hopes on elections and the justice system have been betrayed. 

Due Process or System Failure?

Snowden Attempt to Get Pardon From Obama

The Guardian has an article on Snowden which you can read here.

The point of the article is that his lawyer is mounting a full-court press to get a pardon before the end of the Obama administration, possibly in the very short interval between the election of the new president and her [sic] inauguration.  Some questions were asked in the Comments section which I attempt to answer below. ¹

1. Could Obama pardon Snowden even though he has not been convicted?

Yes. Ford pardoned Nixon who was also not convicted, nor formally charged so far as I know.

2. Does the fact that Bush and Cheney have not been formally accused of crimes by the DOJ mean that they did not commit any crimes?

No, not at all. It just means that the US Government in the person of President Obama has been covering up for them. So far as I know, there is no statute of limitations on murder and torture.

3. Would Obama plausibly pardon Snowden?

Not in a billion years. Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls. Its time to wake up to the fact that absolutely no one who is cleared to know what happened (to the best of their knowledge) has anything good to say about Snowden beyond one comment by a senior military leader that it may be that Snowden was not consciously a tool of foreign intelligence to begin with. ²

No one, repeat no one, who knows anything about the case thinks that his motivations and actions have anything to do with NSA illegal spying on US citizens.

Neither Obama, Clinton or even Trump is likely to pardon Snowden. I also think it is interesting that the Obama administration does not seem to even be willing to discuss a plea bargain with him (e.g. you come home, plead guilty to one thing, serve some time, then be released). In other words, they think his crimes are completely egregious and the case against him airtight.

Anyone who is a Snowden partisan at this point is unlikely to find this blog post of much interest. You know, you just know, that Snowden is a hero and a patriot. Well, if so, why did you vote for Obama? Or did you? Do you think McCain would have been any more sympathetic? Or Hilary Clinton? A little naive, are we, perhaps?

The famous Mad Magazine "Spy vs Spy"

Notes:

1. I have too much time on my hands, clearly.

2. Do not remember who said this.  I believe it was a senior military official who served in a role in Intelligence and whose comments were recorded in the period immediately following the first Snowden releases.

Computer Sciences Corporation Makes A Fast Buck by Betraying Country

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This story today about greed and stupidity features CSC, the Computer Sciences Corporation, a very well known and very large government contractor on important security projects. What you need to know going in is that there is zero possibility that CSC was unaware of what a gross violation not only of law but of trust that the government has, or had, in them by doing what they did.  What did they do?

CSC and another company was hired to engineer an important secure communications system at the Pentagon. A whistleblower revealed that the two companies had subcontracted out a significant part of that project to Russian programmers in Moscow which is not only a direct violation of the letter and spirit of their contract but incredibly stupid as well.

Of course they did this for the best reason that all companies, from Volkswagon to Exxon, violate the law: to make a fast buck at the expense of the people they claim to be working for.

And furthermore, the top executives will probably use the "Volkswagon Defense":, that is, if anyone asks them why they did it, they will no doubt say that they didn't know, and that "engineers" had done it.  That is why we pay these executives 10s of millions a year in salary, bonuses and termination packages, to come up with stupid shit like that.

In this case, it is known that there have been security breaches because of this immense stupidity, at least one virus inserted by the Russians, and who knows how many more, but are the companies punished?

Not really.

The two companies have not admitted to their flagrant violation of law, they have paid a trivial penalty that would not cover even a few pennies of the real costs, and it is now up to the craven and weak Department of Justice to file criminal charges if they dare. But the DOJ never files criminal charges against major US Companies, that would violate every principle that the DOJ stands for which is to protect and exalt the rich.

So one more time we have an example where the so-called free market, e.g. naked greed, violates any and every principle or morality that they claim to uphold.

Good going CSC.

This story is not being covered by the mainstream press as it uses too many big words and probably would not sell as many newspapers, or web clicks, but you can read about it here:

http://intelnews.org/2015/11/12/01-1809/

The US Government should immediately cancel all contracts with CSC and investigate to see in what other ways this criminal organization has violated the trust we had in them.

The Computer Sciences Corporation can be found here.  Their web page gives no indication of to what extent they are a defense contractor.  

http://www.csc.com/

The Case of Daniel Chong: DEA and DOJ Work Together

It is often said that US Government Agencies can not work together well.  Here we have a case where two agencies, the Dept of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration, which is part of the DOJ by the way, worked very well together in order to hide an unlawful arrest, torture and attempted murder through negligence by the DEA.

www.cryptome.org has published on their website a FOIA response in the matter of Daniel Chong. Mr Chong, a student at UCSD, was falsely arrested by the DEA, thrown in prison, told he would be released, and then held without food or water, in handcuffs, for the next five days where he was discovered by accident in a holding cell, unconscious and near death, and rushed to a local intensive care unit. Someone, we do not know who, called various Department of Justice (DOJ) hotlines describing the situation and informing the DOJ of the situation.

Mr Chong did survive. Several investigations were held, he was given a chunk of cash, and the DEA and the DOJ attempted to suppress the matter. No one from the DEA was in the least bit reprimanded, nor dismissed, and the Southern California Attorney General office declined to prosecute for “lack of evidence”.

You may read the FOIA document at

http://cryptome.org/2015/01/DOJ-OIG-DEA-DanielChong_2012-2013.pdf

Here are some obvious questions after reading the report.

1. Why are the names of the DEA Special Agents blacked out?

An innocent citizen was falsely imprisoned tortured by starvation to within an inch of his life and nearly died. Why do we, as American citizens, not have the right to know which of our public servants perpetrated these apparent crimes?

2. For what reason have the people involved not been dismissed from government service?

At the very least we can say they were grossly incompetent and criminally negligent.

3. Why have criminal proceedings not being brought against these people?

The statement of “lack of evidence” is not the least bit credible. From the description of this case, there would seem to be ample evidence of criminal negligence if not malicious intent.

4. How do we know that others have not been tortured by the DEA and possibly murdered. What assurance can you give us that this is a one time anomaly?

Since by all appearances the DEA and the DOJ are covering these crimes up, it gives me no confidence that it has not happened before and is likely to happen again.

If the US Government wants to be given the benefit of the doubt regarding matters that an informed citizenry can not truly know about, such as the NSA matter, then it is all the more important for them to come clean on matters that we certainly have the right to know about.   Very clearly gross incompetence led to the torture and near murder of a citizen and the Attorney General's office does NOTHING?  

Wake up, DOJ.  Its time to do your job and apply a little justice to the matter.  Do it.  Do it now. Or do not be surprised when in the future people do not believe a word you say and assume that you are just lying.

It is nice to discover that DOJ and DEA can work together so amicably in order to repress justice showing once again that there is often a silver lining if you look for one.