{"id":167366,"date":"2015-07-22T00:17:14","date_gmt":"2015-07-22T00:17:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=167366"},"modified":"2015-07-22T14:02:24","modified_gmt":"2015-07-22T14:02:24","slug":"obama-prosecutes-no-mega-crooks-hillary-also-wouldnt-would-sanders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/obama-prosecutes-no-mega-crooks-hillary-also-wouldnt-would-sanders\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama Prosecutes No Mega-Crooks. Hillary Also Wouldn’t. Would Sanders?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse<\/span><\/p>\n

The chief reason why the USA is no longer a democracy (if it ever was) is that its mega-criminals have impunity, just like kings and other dictators in countries that make little pretense to being a \u2018democracy.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Any country where someone stands above the law is a dictatorship, by those people, against the public \u2013 against everyone who is<\/i> punishable by that nation\u2019s executive, legal, and judicial, process, if they violate that country\u2019s laws.<\/span><\/p>\n

Any country where there are two classes of people, one class who are above the law, and another class who are subject to the law, is, by definition, a dictatorship, by the former group, over and against the latter mass. That\u2019s what a dictatorship is \u2013 that\u2019s what it consists of: an aristocracy and its agents, on the one hand; and the public on the other.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, George W. Bush still has not been prosecuted, nor even investigated by the U.S. Government under Obama, for his mega-crimes, from which not only Americans suffer, but people around the world suffered \u2013 and we all suffer them today.<\/span><\/p>\n

He certainly was\u00a0guilty of violating U.S. laws, including treaties that the U.S. had signed, against torture<\/span><\/a>, even though he has never been prosecuted, nor so much as (in the U.S.) investigated, for any of the numerous crimes, organized crimes, RICO-type crimes, such as Hitler did and for which Hitler\u2019s subordinates were hanged after foreign powers took over. (Hitler, of course, committed suicide.) Nor were Bush\u2019s subordinates investigated for that. Obama has protected them all.<\/span><\/a> If Hillary Clinton becomes President, she certainly won\u2019t instruct her Attorney General to investigate either Bush\u2019s crimes or Obama\u2019s crimes (such as his protection of his predecessor from even being investigated for his numerous crimes). But would Sanders? If he wouldn\u2019t, then no one would, and then there is no chance for the U.S. peacefully to become a democracy, because there will then remain<\/i> two classes of people in the U.S. \u2013 the aristocrats and their\u00a0agents (such as the U.S. Presidents they place into office) on the one hand,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and the public on the other. (The law is applied against only the latter group, the public.) If this ongoing succession of criminal Presidents who let their predecessors off the hook continues, then unquestionably the United States is a land where crimes that are committed by the nation\u2019s leadership are not and will not be prosecuted; so, it\u2019s then an established<\/i> dictatorship, because the nation\u2019s leaders stand, and will continue to stand, above the law, and the law is applied only to punish and restrain the people down below in the social order.<\/span><\/p>\n

Furthermore, as I first documented in a 2004 book and repeated in\u00a0an 18 April 2015 online article,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0with documentation to the sources both times, George W. Bush definitely did lie (intentionally deceive) America into invading Iraq. At a 7 September 2002 joint press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, he was asked, “Q Mr. President, can you tell us what conclusive\u00a0evidence of any nuclear \u2013 new evidence you have of nuclear\u00a0weapons capabilities of Saddam\u00a0Hussein?\u201d and he answered that a “new report …\u00a0came out of the\u00a0Atomic \u2013 the IAEA that they were six months\u00a0away from developing a weapon. I don\u2019t know what more evidence we need.\u201d Immediately, the IAEA denied that they had issued any such \u201cnew report\u201d at all, or had any evidence that Iraq after 1998 had restarted their WMD program, but the President never paid any attention to their statement denying his statement, nor did the U.S. press \u2013 they ignored this exposure of an obvious fabrication by the U.S. President. It was the only clear and outright lie by Bush (assisted by the compliant U.S. press) regarding WMD in Iraq as the \u2018justification\u2019 for invading Iraq. Others of Bush\u2019s numerous \u2018misstatements\u2019 on WMD could be attributed to the CIA (and Bush never fired his CIA Director, even after he blamed the CIA after-the-fact when no WMD were found to be in Iraq), but this one was instead attributed to the IAEA \u2013 which they promptly denied to be true. Bob Woodward repeatedly said things like\u00a0“A mistake certainly can be argued, and there is an abundance of evidence. But there was no lying in this that I could find.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0But Woodward couldn\u2019t find it because, like other \u2018journalists,\u2019 he didn\u2019t even ask the IAEA about Bush\u2019s allegation which they had promptly denied. U.S. \u2018journalists\u2019 (actually stenographers for the U.S. Government) reflexively trust U.S. Government sources, and the IAEA isn\u2019t part of the U.S. Government (they\u2019re neither Democrats nor Republicans) \u2013 so, they just ignored it (even though it\u2019s what Bush in that statement had referred to as his source<\/i>). <\/span><\/p>\n

So: Bush unquestionably did lie his nation into invading Iraq. Under the precedent that was established at the Nuremberg Tribunals following WW II, that\u2019s a hanging offense \u2013 and Germans were hung for such war-creating lies, back then. Obama\u2019s refusing to apply accountability for that hanging crime by Bush has made Obama an accessory after-the-fact, selectively not applying the law regarding his predecessor\u2019s enormous crime of aggression against another sovereign nation, which had posed no threat to the U.S., and, even under Bush\u2019s lies wasn\u2019t clearly indicated to constitute an invasion-worthy threat<\/i> to the United States. The entire Bush Administration had to lie through their teeth in order to invade Iraq \u2013 and they did. And now, Obama is part of their crime.<\/span><\/p>\n

On 26 March 2014, I headlined\u00a0“Obama Definitely Lied About Having Intent to Prosecute Banksters,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and I linked to the sources on that. Although Obama was truthful when he told the assembled banksters in private that he would block any prosecution of them, he lied in public when he said the exact opposite: that he would “hold accountable those who broke the law\u201d regarding those mortgage-backed securities and deceptions against both mortgagees and outside investors.<\/span><\/p>\n

Subsequently,<\/a><\/span>\u00a0I listed and documented the following three categories of areas of crime that will need to be investigated and prosecuted regarding Barack Obama: (1) Torture. (2) Protecting Banksters. (3) Perpetrating Ethnic Cleansing Abroad.<\/span><\/p>\n

On top of that, Ted Rall bannered, on 17 February 2015, \u201cObama Destroyed Libya,\u201d<\/span><\/a> and documented that \u201cWhat he did to Libya is as bad as what Bush did to Iraq.\u201d So: there really is no basis on which the question of which of those two U.S. Presidents was the worse can easily be answered. And, on top of that, Obama\u2019s international \u2018trade\u2019 deals will produce even more damage to the public (and more benefit to the aristocracy)<\/span><\/a> than Bill Clinton\u2019s did.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those might seem to be crimes by Republicans \u2013 they\u2019re so far to the right \u2013 but under Obama they have also become crimes by Democrats. Our entire Federal Government is thus now what one reasonably expects from a dictatorship. We even have the type of press that one expects in a dictatorship.<\/span><\/p>\n

If this country does not stop being a dictatorship as soon as the next President enters office, and prosecutions start against the prior two Presidents and their officials, then only a violent second American Revolution will stand any realistic possibility of restoring American democracy, and the sham pretenses that this country is a \u2018democracy\u2019 should simply end. Lying doesn\u2019t do any good for anybody, except psychopaths. It\u2019s doing lots of good for them. And that\u2019s why it should stop, right now. We don\u2019t need to wait for the next President for that.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is no excuse for continuing the lying. None at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

———-<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse The chief reason why the USA is no longer a democracy (if it ever was) is that its mega-criminals have impunity, just like kings and other dictators in countries that make little pretense to being a \u2018democracy.\u2019 Any country where someone stands above the law is a dictatorship, by those people, against the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":167367,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,1622],"tags":[115,30,32,551,96,535,698,38,1021,59,753,804,49,76,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-167366","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-featured","9":"tag-barack-obama","10":"tag-big-brother","11":"tag-cia","12":"tag-corruption","13":"tag-cover-up","14":"tag-global-news","15":"tag-hillary-clinton","16":"tag-iraq","17":"tag-martial-law","18":"tag-military","19":"tag-police-state","20":"tag-politics-2","21":"tag-usa-news","22":"tag-warfare","23":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}