Monday, July 1, 2013

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Where’s Jack McCoy 
When We Need Him?
    He’s killed Americans with no more than an emperor’s thumbs down in place of due process. He’s committed or condoned countless war crimes. He’s rewarded rather than prosecuted the authors of the greatest financial ripoff in history. And now it looks like Barack Obama and his meta minions are also violating the national security and privacy laws of just about every nation on the planet. 
    And not just countries. The latest is that the U.S. was spying on the European Union’s offices. NSA spooks got a tip that the EU was full of foreigners and they apparently assumed that some were terrorists disguised as pencil pushers. Who knows if drone attacks on Brussels were contemplated? The Europeans, who take privacy a lot more seriously than we ‘let it all hang out’ Yanks, are so furious they’re contemplating canceling trade deals.
    As I noted in my last missive, when you tote up the billions being spent and vast facilities being built by the United Stasi of America, the logical conclusion is that, just as Washington seeks military mastery of Earth and space, so does it demand access and control over all the world’s electronic communications. That, of course, is megalomania, not to mention against a load of laws from here to Hobart.
    What’s needed from the illuded 95 percent of the world are prosecutors as gutsy as Law and Order’s fictional JackMcCoy or Spain’s actual Baltasar Garzón who are willing to indict Obama and his henchpersons. Edward Snowden, his laptops loaded with primo proof, would make an excellent witness for the prosecution.
    It was Garzón who filed charges against Washington’s good buddy and bloody dictator Augusto Pinochet of Chile for the torture and murder of Spanish citizens. Pinochet was visiting the UK at the time and Mrs. Thatcher’s government detained him in luxury before allowing him to go back to Chile. He avoided a host of charges at home by getting sick and dropping dead. Not being a right winger accused of torturing 30,000 men, women and children, it’s doubtful that Edward Snowden would be accorded such genteel treatment by our UK flunky.
     Doubtless the leader of the world’s most lawyerful empire would find ways to avoid or beat the rap. But just having indictments hung around Obama’s neck like leis from his Hawaiian home place might well dissuade future presidents from playing Ghengis Khan with a keyboard. 

     We've seen brave hackers like Edward Snowden step forward to challenge the empire. Now it’s time to see some brave jurists join the fray.