Legal Railroad on Track For Surviving Boston Marathon Bomber

Just because we “know” someone is guilty, doesn’t mean a fair trial isn’t necessary. Precisely because the state is always “sure” the accused is guilty. It is to protect all of us from the state that fair trials for the “obviously guilty” are necessary.

But truly fair trials are a rarity in the U.S.

If a trial is a sham, then it is just a show trial.

That is the case in the “trial” currently unfolding for the surviving Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

The Federal judge in the case denied the defense’s request for a change of venue (moving the trial to another location). The judge speciously insists jurors in the Boston area, who have been subjected to years of agit-propaganda and demonization of Tsarnaev by the media, will be fair and impartial and unbiased.

That is positively absurd.

And two weeks before the trial began, the Federal prosecutors pulled a typically sleazy trick, handing the defense 2,000 pages of documents. Naturally, the defense asked for a delay to review the documents. The judge refused. As is usual in the U.S., the judge is an ally of the prosecutors.

No change of venue, no delay for defense to properly prepare.

Notice the U.S. courts allow the government to hold prisoners for many years without trying them when it wants. If the defense needs a delay in a political case, it’s denied.

Isn’t the government confident in its evidence? Why does it need to engineer an UNFAIR trial to guarantee a conviction?

And since the U.S. government is seeking the death penalty, only “death penalty qualified” jurors are allowed to be empaneled as jurors. That is, during the questioning of the jury pool, they are asked if they oppose the death penalty. Any who do are excluded. (The state of Massachusetts has no death penalty so probably most residents of the state oppose it. Therefore the jury will automatically be unrepresentative of the population. As this is a Federal trial of course Federal death penalty law applies.)

Pro-death penalty jurors have been proven by sociological research to be more pro-prosecution than other people- another built-in bias favoring the government.

One thing is sure- the FBI agent who executed  Ibragim Todashev will never be tried.

[On trial: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. 20 years old now.  Boston Marathon bombing April 15, 2013. Three killed, about 200 wounded. Brother Tamerlan was 26 when he was gunned down in a hail of police bullets. (The police tried to execute Dzhokhar also, as he was hiding in a small boat in the backyard of a homeowner who reported him to police after they gave up looking. They pumped bullets into the boat, wounding him. The media falsely reported a “firefight.” Dzhokhar had no gun with him by then.)]

See “FBI Used Facial Recognition Software ToIdentify Boston Bombers (SHH! Don't Tell Anyone!),” May 3, 2013.

Choom Gang Alumnus Increases Repression of Marijuana Smokers

The high school and college pothead Barack Obama, having clawed his way up the ladder of the U.S. political system to the top, is using the power of the presidency to increase the repression of people who did what he used to do (and did a LOT) earlier in life- namely get high. 

He is increasing the Federal budget for “war on drugs” repression, proposing that Congress appropriate over $14.5 billion for the repression of recreational drug use.  He is lavishing these billions not just on the Department of “Justice” (criminal persecution) but also on the already-gargantuan Department of “Homeland Security” (a mega-conglomerate of various agencies with repressive functions), the White House’s own in-house drug repression office, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (whose boss is the so-called “drug czar,” and whose main job is to be chief anti-drug propagandist), and the Department of “Defense” (War), notwithstanding the fact that under the Posse Comitatus Act, passed in 1878, it is illegal for the U.S. military to have law enforcement functions. But that’s been a dead letter for years, same as the so-called Bill of Rights. The military gets about $1.3 billion for “drug war” repression activities. And Obama is tossing another $187 million to the Federal Bureau of Prisons (on top of the billions it already gets) to lock up MORE people the drug warriors will presumably catch in their nets. [1]

Obama wants a huge increase of 20% in funding for so-called drug task forces, which are gangs of Federal, State, and local police who not only target people for imprisonment and conduct terror raids on homes, but steal hundreds of millions of dollars a year in property and cash from people in so-called “civil forfeiture” seizures, where no crime is charged to the victim, no arrest made, but the stolen assets are claimed to be “tainted” by coming from the sale of drugs. No evidence is needed as there is no court procedure. The victims have to spend thousands of dollars to challenge these thefts in court and prove that the stolen assets ARE NOT from drugs. Needless to say, given the expense and burden of proof, most victims are forced to eat their losses. This corrupt, Mexican-police-style “legal” theft has gotten so widespread that even “respectable” media outlets like The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and NPR have been forced to run stories about it recently. [2]

These increases are not because Obama is under any political pressure (if anything, the pressure is in the opposite direction these days). This is not to appease any reactionaries (another thing he does a lot of). This is something he’s doing because he wants to, and under the radar (i.e. without mentioning it and hoping it passes unnoticed).

He just gave a nationally-televised speech to Congress, that annual ritual called the “State of the Union Address.” He did a lot of bloviating on various matters during that speech. He had the chance then to explain why repression against people seeking pleasure by taking certain substances  needed to be increased. (And attacking the suppliers of those products is part of attacking the ultimate consumers, by making the products vastly more expensive, risky to obtain, and unavailable in many cases.)

As is almost always the case with Obama, the reality of his oppressive, anti-human actions is disguised underneath mendacious rhetoric. The Pied Piper President’s budget document blithely claims that "a 21st Century approach to drug policy that outlines innovative policies and programs and recognizes that substance use disorders are not just a criminal justice issue, but also a major public health concern" and calls for "an evidence-based plan for real drug policy reform, spanning the spectrum of prevention, early intervention, treatment, recovery support, criminal justice reform, effective law enforcement, and international cooperation."

 

We can discount the sops to “humane” approaches to so-called “drug abuse.” As far as “criminal justice [sic] reform,” if it amounts to anything at all, be assured it will only mean a slight lessening of the screws on some victims caught in the claws of the massive domestic repression apparatus of the U.S. The U.S. has the world’s largest prison population. Larger than China’s even, which has over four times the population of the U.S. The U.S., with a population of 311 million (a mere 4% of the total world population of 7 billion, or 7,000 millions) imprisons over 2 million people currently, 25% of all the prisoners on earth. It imprisons almost one in every 100 adults in the country.

At a time a couple of years ago when Russia’s Putin pardoned and freed 1,000 Russian prisoners, Obama countered by commuting the sentences of a grand total of eight prisoners. And not even immediately: some were forced to serve more months in prison first, having already been locked up for years on drug charges. (What sort of Jesuitical moral calculus Obama The Thoughtful used to determine to the precise month the “right” amount of prison time for these victimless crimes, we are forced to guess at. But why bother.)

Judging by the record of the repressive reign of Obama and his Torquemada, Eric Holder Jr. ( a rich corporate lawyer and Obama’s attorney general, the head of the Federal Department of “Justice,” who during the reign of William Clinton was the number two in the DO”J” and shared responsibility for various state crimes such as the extermination of the Branch Davidian religious cult in Waco, Texas. [3]), any tweaks to the system of oppression will be exceedingly minor.

 

And “effective law enforcement” is ALWAYS code for more police power, more police brutality, more arrests, and of course and inevitably, more imprisonment.

Some “reform.”

[Where states have legalized medical marijuana, Obama has sicced the DEA {Drug Enforcement Administration, the corrupt and murderous Federal narc) on the legal marijuana dispensaries and prosecuted them under Federal drug laws. For more on Obama’s nasty record of repression regarding recreational drugs, see “From the Choom Gang to Drug Warrior, Barack Obama Keeps Bogarting Joints,” the daily beast.com, May 4th, 2013.]

1] Repressive agencies have proliferated like poisonous weeds in America over the last several decades, as our rulers apparently feel insecure about their ability to keep us in our places. The popular upsurges of the not-even-a-decade from about 1965-1972 also put a scare in them. Not only are there officially sixteen agencies in the so-called “intelligence community,” but numerous different arms and programs of the repressive Leviathan are devoted to stomping out recreational drug use. Not content with an entire Federal police agency devoted solely to drug repression, the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration, which has a long and sordid history of crimes including murder, which Obama want to give $2.5 billion to), there is also on the Federal level the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (another half billion bucks), $293 million for the Office of Justice Programs (an increase of $50 million), and the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program, which is being cut to “only” $193 million. And Obama only wants $307 million for the White House’s very own drug war office, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which is a reduction. And other Federal agencies use the drug laws to attack people, and provide “intelligence,” such as the NSA passing along drug activity it finds in its total surveillance of phone calls and emails.

Of course, the Republicans who now control Congress might want to “outbid” Obama in repression and increase these figures. 

2] Over the years Libertarians and some civil libertarians have tried to raise awareness of police this police thieving. For a number of detailed New Yorker articles on the matter, go to http://www.newyorker.com/search and enter “civil forfeiture” in the search box.

For an unusual case- unusual because the victims had the wherewithal to pay tens of thousands in legal fees, AND were able to get their stolen money back, see  “Obama AG nominee Loretta Lynch quietly dropped $450,000 civil forfeiture case a week before hearings,” rawstory.com, January 26, 2015.

Most of the time the amounts seized are smaller, even $50. Personal electronic items are a favorite of the thieves. Cars, boats, houses, and any object of value you can imagine gets stolen by American “law enforcement.”

Another notorious case involves a small grocery store. See “The grabbing hand of the law” in the right-wing capitalist cheerleading British mag., The Economist. (Nov. 2^nd, 2013.)

The ACLU points out that police like to target racial minorities and the poor. (Easy pickings!)

The Institute for Justice (a public interest law firm) describes a number of outrageous cases of government theft (“asset forfeiture”) on its website. They also have a report, “Policing for Profit,” and statistics.

This particular U.S. nightmare has been going on in its current form for thirty years.

These cases underline the fact that the “war on drugs” is really a war on people- whether they choose to seek pleasure by taking substances the government disapproves of, or not.

3] See “Waco: The Rules of Engagement.”

For the New York Times, Obituaries Are Perfect Places for Propaganda

I know that sounds far-fetched, but it’s true. This organ has a consistent habit of blatantly distorting reality in its obits to conform to its ideological predilections and political goals.

There are examples of this every week. Here’s one from the Sunday paper of February 1st.

The obituary is for Reies Tijerina, whom the Times describes as a figure in “a radical Chicano property rights movement.” [1] 

The second paragraph says “He never achieved his goal of reclaiming – for Mexicans, Indians and descendants of the original Spanish settlers -  the millions of acres that changed hands when northern Mexico became the American Southwest in the mid-19^th century.”

That opaque description of the actual history is all you get. What exactly occurred “in the mid-19^th century” that caused “northern Mexico” to magically “become” “the American Southwest” and making “millions of acres” “change hands?” 

A little thing called the Mexican-American War of 1848, when the U.S. invaded Mexico, conquered it, and ripped off half of Mexico as the spoils of war. Not exactly a normal real estate transaction, as NYT propagandist Sam Roberts, or one of his invisible power-munchkin editors, has it.

How dishonest can people who call themselves “journalists” be? Is this really a “news” paper, or a propaganda platform?

It would be sort of like reading an obituary in a German publication and coming across a sentence saying “the Jewish population of Europe underwent a sharp decline in the mid-20^th century.”  True, sure, but SO misleading, evasive, and dishonest as to qualify for the word, “lie.”

I have come across numerous similar examples of blatant, mendacious political propaganda stuffed into NYT obits over the years. As I say, you can find examples during any week. And it’s not just in obits about political figures, although they’re the worst, as one would expect. I will present more as I have the time to do so.

For more acidic analyses of propaganda that burns away the deceptions, go to propagandaanalysis.blogspot.com.

1] “Reies Tijerina, 88: Led Fight for ChicanoLand Rights,” Feb. 1, 2015, page 16, by career NYT hack Sam Roberts. [Posted on nyt.com Jan. 27th.]

Castles Made of Sand Fall Into the Sea

The country of Yemen sat on a fault,

The country of Yemen had a great fall,

And all Obama’s drones and all Obama’s SEALs,

Couldn’t put Yemen together again.

Another nation fractures along ethnic, religious, tribal, and political fault lines- under U.S. pressure. The Selfish Superpower heedlessly meddles in yet another country, wrecking it in the process.

Yemen was a taped-together nation in the first place. It was really two countries: North Yemen, which the notorious “strongman” Ali Abdullah Saleh ruled from 1978 to 1990, and South Yemen, a leftist land. The two never got along, but united in 1990, with Saleh as boss (official title: “President).

In 2012 his oppressed subjects were inspired by the Arab Spring to stage street protests, to which Saleh responded in the usual fashion- with murderous violence. But there was a split in his armed forces, and eventually the U.S. eased him out and replaced him with one of his underlings. Saleh figured he’s rule from behind this frontman, but the U.S. had other plans. They preferred a new, weaker boss who would be their puppet. The U.S. assassinations by drone and commando raid continued, eroding whatever legitimacy the “government” had left by proving it exercised no sovereignty.

For years, the usual "collateral damage " (murders of bystanders and "mistaken identity" killings)

by the U.S. in Yemen have soured large sectors of the Yemeni population on the ruling regime, which did nothing for them and now brought in a foreign nation to disrupt their lives and bring grief.

Now the Houthis, a minority group, have seized the capital, Sana, by force, obliging the U.S. puppet (U.S. government propaganda network NPR calls him a U.S. “ally”) to resign when his palace was surrounded by armed Houthis.

Houthis and Al-Qaeda in theArabian Peninsula, the Yemeni  franchise of A-Q, are enemies. But the Houthis despise the U.S., so they won’t be U.S. stooges.

Now the nation is cracking apart. U.S. media insist Iran is behind the Houthis. More objective observers see the hand of Saleh, who hopes to get back in power. U.S. media present no evidence of Iranian involvement, merely assertion. This should be given no more credence sans actual facts than any U.S. political propaganda deserves (namely none).

 

 “I Shall Return!” Saleh vows (in his mind).