The Eroding Character of the American People
By Paul Craig Roberts
How can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of some fool’s hand?
To see him obviously framed
Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land
Where justice is a game.—Bob Dylan, “Hurricane”
July 24, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - Attorney John W. Whitehead opens a recent posting (see
below) on his Rutherford Institute website with these words from a song
by Bob Dylan. Why don’t all of us feel ashamed? Why only Bob Dylan?
I
wonder how many of Bob Dylan’s fans understand what he is telling them.
American justice has nothing to do with innocence or guilt. It only has
to do with the prosecutor’s conviction rate, which builds his political
career. Considering the gullibility of the American people, American
jurors are the last people to whom an innocent defendant should trust
his fate. The jury will betray the innocent almost every time.
As
Lawrence Stratton and I show in our book (2000, 2008) there is no
justice in America. We titled our book, “How the Law Was Lost.” It is a
description of how the protective features in law that made law a shield
of the innocent was transformed over time into a weapon in the hands of
the government, a weapon used against the people. The loss of law as a
shield occurred prior to 9/11, which “our representative government”
used to construct a police state.
The
marketing department of our publisher did not appreciate our title and
instead came up with “The Tyranny of Good Intentions.” We asked what
this title meant. The marketing department answered that we showed that
the war on crime, which gave us the abuses of RICO, the war on child
abusers, which gave us show trials of total innocents that bested Joseph
Stalin’s show trials of the heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the
war on drugs, which gave “Freedom and Democracy America” broken
families and by far the highest incarceration rate in the world all
resulted from good intentions to combat crime, to combat drugs, and to
combat child abuse. The publisher’s title apparently succeeded, because
15 years later the book is still in print. It has sold enough copies
over these years that, had the sales occurred upon publication would
have made the book a “best seller.” The book, had it been a best seller,
would have gained more attention, and perhaps law schools and bar
associations could have used it to hold the police state at bay.
Whitehead
documents how hard a not guilty verdict is to come by for an innocent
defendant. Even if the falsely accused defendant and his attorney
survive the prosecutor’s pressure to negotiate a plea bargain and arrive
at a trial, they are confronted with jurors who are unable to doubt
prosecutors, police, or witnesses paid to lie against the innocent
defendant. Jurors even convicted the few survivors of the Clinton
regime’s assault on the Branch Davidians of Waco, the few who were not
gassed, shot, or burned to death by US federal forces. This religious
sect was demonized by Washington and the presstitute media as child
abusers who were manufacturing automatic weapons while they raped
children. The charges proved to be false, like Saddam Hussein’s “weapons
of mass destruction,” and so forth, but only after all of the innocents
were dead or in prison.
The
question is: why do Americans not merely sit silently while the lives
of innocents are destroyed, but actually support the destruction of the
lives of innocents? Why do Americans believe “official sources” despite
the proven fact that “official sources” lie repeatedly and never tell
the truth?
The
only conclusion that one can come to is that the American people have
failed. We have failed Justice. We have failed Mercy. We have failed the
US Constitution. We have failed Truth. We have failed Democracy and
representative government. We have failed ourselves and humanity. We
have failed the confidence that our Founding Fathers put in us. We have
failed God. If we ever had the character that we are told we had, we
have obviously lost it. Little, if anything, remains of the “American
character.”
Was the
American character present in the torture prisons of Abu Ghraib,
Guantanamo Bay, and hidden CIA torture dungeons where US military and
CIA personnel provided photographic evidence of their delight in
torturing and abusing prisoners? Official reports have concluded that
along with torture went rape, sodomy, and murder. All of this was
presided over by American psychologists with Ph.D. degrees.
We
see the same inhumanity in the American police who respond to women
children, the elderly, the physically and mentally handicapped, with
gratuitous violence. For no reason whatsoever, police murder, taser,
beat, and abuse US citizens. Every day there are more reports, and
despite the reports the violence goes on and on and on. Clearly, the
police enjoy inflicting pain and death on citizens whom the police are
supposed to serve and protect. There have always been bullies in the
police force, but the wanton police violence of our time indicates a
complete collapse of the American character.
The
failure of the American character has had tremendous and disastrous
consequences for ourselves and for the world. At home Americans have a
police state in which all Constitutional protections have vanished.
Abroad, Iraq and Libya, two formerly prosperous countries, have been
destroyed. Libya no longer exists as a country. One million dead Iraqis,
four million displaced abroad, hundreds of thousands of orphans and
birth defects from the American ordinance, and continuing ongoing
violence from factions fighting over the remains. These facts are
incontestable. Yet the United States Government claims to have brought
“freedom and democracy” to Iraq. “Mission accomplished,” declared one of
the mass murderers of the 21st century, George W. Bush.
The
question is: how can the US government make such an obviously false
outrageous claim without being shouted down by the rest of the world and
by its own population? Is the answer that good character has
disappeared from the world?
Or
is the rest of the world too afraid to protest? Washington can force
supposedly sovereign countries to acquiesce to its will or be cut off
from the international payments mechanism that Washington controls,
and/or be sanctioned, and/or be bombed, droned, or invaded, and/or be
assassinated or overthrown in a coup. On the entire planet Earth there
are only two countries capable of standing up to Washington, Russia and
China, and neither wants to stand up if they can avoid it.
For
whatever the reasons, not only Americans but most of the world as well
accommodate Washington’s evil and are thereby complicit in the evil.
Those humans with a moral conscience are gradually being positioned by
Washington and London as “domestic extremists” who might have to be
rounded up and placed in detention centers. Examine the recent
statements by General Wesley Clark and British Prime Minister Cameron
and remember Janet Napolitano’s statement that the Department of
Homeland Security has shifted its focus from terrorists to domestic
extremists, an undefined and open-ended term.
Americans
with good character are being maneuvered into a position of
helplessness. As John Whitehead makes clear, the American people cannot
even prevent “their police,” paid by their tax payments, from murdering 3
Americans each day, and this is only the officially reported murders.
The actual account is likely higher.
What
Whitehead describes and what I have noticed for many years is that the
American people have lost, in addition to their own sense of truth and
falsity, any sense of mercy and justice for other peoples. Americans
accept no sense of responsibility for the millions of peoples that
Washington has exterminated over the past two decades dating back to the
second term of Clinton. Every one of the millions of deaths is based on
a Washington lie.
When
Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, was asked if the
Clinton’s regime’s sanctions, which had claimed the lives of 500,000
Iraqi children, were justified, she obviously expected no outrage from
the American people when she replied in the affirmative.
Americans
need to face the facts. The loss of character means the loss of liberty
and the transformation of government into a criminal enterprise.
The American Nightmare: The Tyranny of the Criminal Justice System
By John W. Whitehead
The Rutherford Institute
Justice in America is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Just
ask Jeffrey Deskovic, who spent 16 years in prison for a rape and
murder he did not commit. Despite the fact that Deskovic’s DNA did not
match what was found at the murder scene, he was singled out by police
as a suspect because he wept at the victim’s funeral (he was 16 years
old at the time), then badgered over the course of two months into
confessing his guilt. He was eventually paid $6.5 million in reparation.
James
Bain spent 35 years in prison for the kidnapping and rape of a
9-year-old boy, but he too was innocent of the crime. Despite the fact
that the prosecutor’s case was flimsy—it hinged on the similarity of
Bain’s first name to the rapist’s, Bain’s ownership of a red motorcycle,
and a misidentification of Bain in a lineup by a hysterical 9-year-old
boy—Bain was sentenced to life in prison. He was finally freed after DNA
testing proved his innocence, and was paid $1.7 million.
Mark
Weiner got off relatively easy when you compare his experience to the
thousands of individuals who are spending lifetimes behind bars for
crimes they did not commit.Weiner was wrongfully arrested, convicted,
and jailed for more than two years for a crime he too did not commit. In
his case, a young woman claimed Weiner had abducted her, knocked her
out and then sent taunting text messages to her boyfriend about his
plans to rape her. Despite the fact that cell phone signals, eyewitness
accounts and expert testimony indicated the young woman had fabricated
the entire incident, the prosecutor and judge repeatedly rejected any
evidence contradicting the woman’s far-fetched account, sentencing
Weiner to eight more years in jail. Weiner was only released after his
accuser was caught selling cocaine to undercover cops.
In
the meantime, Weiner lost his job, his home, and his savings, and time
with his wife and young son. As Slate reporter journalist Dahlia
Lithwick warned, “If anyone suggests that the fact that Mark Weiner was
released this week means ‘the system works,’ I fear that I will have to
punch him in the neck. Because at every single turn, the system that
should have worked to consider proof of Weiner’s innocence failed him.”
The system that should have worked didn’t, because the system is broken, almost beyond repair.
In
courtroom thrillers like 12 Angry Men and To Kill a Mockingbird,
justice is served in the end because someone—whether it’s Juror #8 or
Atticus Finch—chooses to stand on principle and challenge wrongdoing,
and truth wins.
Unfortunately, in the real world, justice is harder to come by, fairness is almost unheard of, and truth rarely wins.
On
paper, you may be innocent until proven guilty, but in actuality,
you’ve already been tried, found guilty and convicted by police
officers, prosecutors and judges long before you ever appear in a
courtroom. Chronic injustice has turned the American dream into a
nightmare. At every step along the way, whether it’s encounters with the
police, dealings with prosecutors, hearings in court before judges and
juries, or jail terms in one of the nation’s many prisons, the system is
riddled with corruption, abuse and an appalling disregard for the
rights of the citizenry.
Due
process rights afforded to a person accused of a crime—the right to
remain silent, the right to be informed of the charges against you, the
right to representation by counsel, the right to a fair trial, the right
to a speedy trial, the right to prove your innocence with witnesses and
evidence, the right to a reasonable bail, the right to not languish in
jail before being tried, the right to confront your accusers, etc.—mean
nothing when the government is allowed to sidestep those safeguards
against abuse whenever convenient.
It’s
telling that while President Obama said all the right things about the
broken state of our criminal justice system—that we jail too many
Americans for nonviolent crimes (we make up 5 percent of the world’s
population, but our prison population constitutes nearly 25% of the
world’s prisoners), that we spend more money on incarceration than any
other nation ($80 billion a year), that we sentence people for longer
jail terms than their crimes merit, that our criminal justice system is
far from color-blind, that the nation’s school-to-prison pipeline is
contributing to overcrowded jails, and that we need to focus on
rehabilitation of criminals rather than retribution—he failed to own up
to the government’s major role in contributing to this injustice in
America.
Indeed, while
Obama placed the responsibility for reform squarely in the hands of
prosecutors, judges and police, he failed to acknowledge that they bear
the burden of our failed justice system, along with the legislatures and
corporations who have worked with them to create an environment that is
hostile to the rights of the accused.
In
such a climate, we are all the accused, the guilty and the suspect. As I
document in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American
People, we’re operating in a new paradigm where the citizenry are
presumed guilty and treated as suspects, our movements tracked, our
communications monitored, our property seized and searched, our bodily
integrity disregarded, and our inalienable rights to “life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness” rendered insignificant when measured against
the government’s priorities.
Every
American is now in jeopardy of being targeted and punished for a crime
he did not commit thanks to an overabundance of arcane laws. Making
matters worse, by allowing government agents to operate above the law,
immune from wrongdoing, we have created a situation in which the law is
one-sided and top-down, used as a hammer to oppress the populace, while
useless in protecting us against government abuse.
Add
to the mix a profit-driven system of incarceration in which state and
federal governments agree to keep the jails full in exchange for having
private corporations run the prisons, and you will find the only word to
describe such a state of abject corruption is “evil.”
How
else do you explain a system that allows police officers to shoot first
and ask questions later, without any real consequences for their
misdeeds? Despite the initial outcry over the shootings of unarmed
individuals in Ferguson and Baltimore, the pace of police shootings has
yet to slow.
For those who
survive an encounter with the police only to end up on the inside of a
jail cell, waiting for a “fair and speedy trial,” it’s often a long
wait. Consider that 60 percent of the people in the nation’s jails have
yet to be convicted of a crime. There are 2.3 million people in jails or
prisons in America. Those who can’t afford bail, “some of them
innocent, most of them nonviolent and a vast majority of them
impoverished,” will spend about four months in jail before they even get
a trial.
Not even that promised “day in court” is a guarantee that justice will be served.
As
Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals points out,
there are an endless number of factors that can render an innocent man
or woman a criminal and caged for life: unreliable eyewitnesses,
fallible forensic evidence, flawed memories, coerced confessions, harsh
interrogation tactics, uninformed jurors, prosecutorial misconduct,
falsified evidence, and overly harsh sentences, to name just a few.
In
early 2015, the Justice Department and FBI “formally acknowledged that
nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed
testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against
criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period…. The admissions
mark a watershed in one of the country’s largest forensic scandals,
highlighting the failure of the nation’s courts for decades to keep
bogus scientific information from juries, legal analysts said.”
“How
do rogue forensic scientists and other bad cops thrive in our criminal
justice system?” asks Judge Kozinski. “The simple answer is that some
prosecutors turn a blind eye to such misconduct because they’re more
interested in gaining a conviction than achieving a just result.”
The
power of prosecutors is not to be underestimated. Increasingly, when we
talk about innocent people being jailed for crimes they did not commit,
the prosecutor plays a critical role in bringing about that injustice.
As The Washington Post reports, “Prosecutors win 95 percent of their
cases, 90 percent of them without ever having to go to trial…. Are
American prosecutors that much better? No… it is because of the plea
bargain, a system of bullying and intimidation by government lawyers for
which they ‘would be disbarred in most other serious countries….’”
This
phenomenon of innocent people pleading guilty makes a mockery of
everything the criminal justice system is supposed to stand for:
fairness, equality and justice. As Judge Jed S. Rakoff concludes, “our
criminal justice system is almost exclusively a system of plea
bargaining, negotiated behind closed doors and with no judicial
oversight. The outcome is very largely determined by the prosecutor
alone.”
It’s estimated
that between 2 and 8 percent of convicted felons who have agreed to a
prosecutor’s plea bargain (remember, there are 2.3 million prisoners in
America) are in prison for crimes they did not commit.
Clearly,
the Coalition for Public Safety was right when it concluded, “You don’t
need to be a criminal to have your life destroyed by the U.S. criminal
justice system.”
It wasn’t
always this way. As Judge Rakoff recounts, the Founding Fathers
envisioned a criminal justice system in which the critical element “was
the jury trial, which served not only as a truth-seeking mechanism and a
means of achieving fairness, but also as a shield against tyranny.”
That
shield against tyranny has long since been shattered, leaving Americans
vulnerable to the cruelties, vanities, errors, ambitions and greed of
the government and its partners in crime.
There is not enough money in the world to make reparation to those whose lives have been disrupted by wrongful convictions.
Over
the past quarter century, more than 1500 Americans have been released
from prison after being cleared of crimes they did not commit. These are
the fortunate ones. For every exonerated convict who is able to prove
his innocence after 10, 20 or 30 years behind bars, Judge Kozinski
estimates there may be dozens who are innocent but cannot prove it,
lacking access to lawyers, evidence, money and avenues of appeal.
For
those who have yet to fully experience the injustice of the American
system of justice, it’s only a matter of time. America no longer
operates under a system of justice characterized by due process, an
assumption of innocence, probable cause, and clear prohibitions on
government overreach and police abuse. Instead, our courts of justice
have been transformed into courts of order, advocating for the
government’s interests, rather than championing the rights of the
citizenry, as enshrined in the Constitution.
Without
courts willing to uphold the Constitution’s provisions when government
officials disregard them, and a citizenry knowledgeable enough to be
outraged when those provisions are undermined, the Constitution provides
little protection against the police state.
* * *
The
day I read John Whitehead’s article (July 22), there were new reports
of a number of police murders of innocent American citizens. Sandra
Bland, a black women who protested police violence against blacks was
found hanged in her cell in a Texas jail after her false arrest.
Just a few days ago Samuel Dubose was murdered by a police officer with a shot to his head while he sat inside his car.
A
3o-year old asthmatic white chemical engineer was without cause
hog-tied by Mississippi police with face positioned to prevent
breathing, resulting in his death.
Americans
are in more danger from police than from terrorists. During the Iraqi
war, American police murdered more Americans than the number of US
troops killed in combat.
In
this age of perverted justice and government-sanctioned tyranny, the
Constitution is no safeguard against government wrongdoing such as SWAT
team raids, domestic surveillance, police shootings of unarmed and
unthreatening citizens, indefinite detentions, asset forfeitures,
prosecutorial misconduct, etc.
Today
in the United States of America citizens are as unprotected by law as
the aristocracy in England prior to the Magna Carta. America has far
more in common with the Medieval dungeon state than it does with the
Declaration of Independence.
In
a country in which the citizens have no protection from the state and
can be shot down in their streets and homes by unaccountable police,
detained indefinitely without charges or conviction, executed on
suspicion alone without due process of law, there is no freedom, no
democracy, no accountability of government to the people.
The
United States of America is no longer the hope of mankind. The USA has
become the source of evil and dread. Will America destroy the world as
well as itself?
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