Liberty & Justice for Some: Insurrection and the January 6th Probe

It has been clear for some time that former President Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 election. So, why isn’t Trump in jail? It is for the same reason that George W. Bush, and Joe Biden have yucked it up on the Jimmy Kimmel show, and why the “Chief” war criminal himself Dick Cheney, even received applause during a recent visit to the Capital. In the US, if you are powerful and one of the wealthy few, you are basically above the law. Donald Trump will not spend one day in jail. If he does, then that would open the door for other former presidents (and their cronies) to be charged for their crimes too. It is not going to happen.

Barack Obama promised to conduct an investigation into the war crimes of the Bush administration in 2008, but later reneged, claiming that the US needed to move forward and not backwards (he was likely concerned about a boomerang effect, and one day being the target himself of an investigation into his own war crimes). In his excellent book, “With Liberty and Justice for Some”, Glenn Greenwald supposes that each US President has known that they are above the law since Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon in 1974. As a result, each successive president has been emboldened, and less inclined to do the right thing.

We see it happening again with the Biden administration. Joe Biden is a criminal too. He was one of the architects of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan (900,000 deaths and $8 trillion according to Brown University, and 2.4 million dead and counting (in Iraq alone), as per CODEPINK). It wasn’t a “Fog of War” or a mistake based on bad information as most of the war crime participants (on both sides of the aisle), like to say now in their attempts to rewrite history. We knew they were lying, and they knew they were lying, but they still went ahead with their catastrophic and illegal war plans anyway. And if maximizing profits and global dominance at any cost is the goal, why would they stop? It is outrageous that no US president has been held accountable, no matter how monstrous his actions, for what seems like forever. And aside from the diabolical actions of US leadership, what kind of messages are we sending to our children, and to the rest of the world?

Currently, Joe Biden and US military leaders are at it again as they continue to demonize China, while ratcheting up tensions by talking casually about the use of nuclear weapons, and selling at least 12 nuclear submarines to nearby Australia (don’t get me started on the hundreds of US military bases presently surrounding China). China is not our enemy, or a military threat (the only threat that it may pose is economic, although it is beginning to spend more on its military due to US saber rattling). Since US leadership has demonstrated for decades that it is far more interested in global hegemony and obscene profits for the super rich, rather than peace and justice for all, it has had to create conflicts and wars on its own (along with the help and obedience of the corporate/state media). For example, two days ago, Biden’s Secretary of Defense (Defense? Really?) Lloyd Austin publicly disrespected China once again, and accused the PRC of being “coercive” and “aggressive”. Can you imagine if the situation was reversed, and China had hundreds of military bases surrounding the US, while it also provoked and antagonized the US whenever possible? The Biden folks have also refused to negotiate with Russia on Ukraine (bringing us closer to a confrontation with another nuclear armed power), and have blindly backed Israel’s never-ending crimes against the Palestinians (and even the recent killing of US journalist Shireen Abu Akleh), as well as the equally atrocious lawlessness of Saudi Arabia (including its killing of another US journalist, Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi). And the list goes on, and on.

So, yes, despite his countless crimes, and once being called the worst criminal in human history, Donald Trump will not spend one day in jail. Heck, considering the level of corruption, and how broken our judicial and political systems appear to be at the moment, he may even be our next president. 🙁

*Update: According to Constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, “The Democrats are soft because they have skeletons in the closet that they know they’ve done the same or similar things, maybe not on quite the same magnitude, and they worry, “Well, if we lose the elections to the Republicans in the fall, they’re going to turn these precedents, and they’re coming after us. And we’ve got a lot of skeletons that we want to conceal. So: we go soft on them, they’ll go soft on us”…The press always said, “Hey, criminally prosecuting a former President? That’s never been done before…” What are they talking about? If nobody’s above the law, it’s even more important to go after the top dogs.”

“History is important. If you don’t know history, it’s as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.” – Howard Zinn

Image: Banksy

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