01.07.09
“Prosecute the weak, protect the powerful”
Glenn Greenwald’s column deserves reading. Here’s the conclusion:
… What those Democratic leaders did was, at the very best, a total abdication of their responsibilities. More accurately, they actively and culpably enabled the illegal spying. None of them — for obvious reasons — has called for any investigation or prosecution of Bush officials for having broken the law. All three of them — for equally obvious reasons — voted for the FISA bill last August which immunized lawbreaking telecoms and all but ensured a total end to any real public disclosure of what happened here. Harman and Rockefellerboth attended the giddy White House signing party where they joined Bush, Cheney, Orrin Hatch, John Boehner, Joe Lieberman and other luminaries in celebrating the harmless end to the NSA scandal in which they both played such an important role.
Meanwhile, the only person to pay any price from this rampant lawbreaking – Tom Tamm — is the one with infinitely less power than all of them, the one who risked his job security and even freedom to bring to the nation’s attention the fact that our highest government officials were deliberately committing felonies in how they spied on us. Those who broke the law and those who actively enabled it — the Cheneys and Haydens and Rockefellers and Pelosis and Harmans — all protect one another, and have virtually every political and media elite righteously demand that nothing be done to them.
But there is not a peep of protest over the ongoing, life-destroying persecution of the former DOJ lawyer whose conscience compelled him to do what those cowardly Democratic leaders would not do: take action to uncover rampant criminality at the highest levels of our government. Harry Reid is a real tough guy when it comes to the momentous goal of preventing Roland Burris from entering the Senate. Dianne Feinstein is enraged over the grave injustice that she was not told in advance about the new CIA Director. Is it even possible to envision a Democratic Congressional leader — many of whom eagerly enabled most of the abuses of the last eight years undertaken by the Bush administration — objecting to the ongoing persecution of this whistle-blower, someone who did the job they were all either afraid or unwilling to do?
That’s America’s justice system in a nutshell: the President who deliberately and knowingly violated our 30-year-old law making it a felony offense to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants has the entire political and media class eagerly defend him against prosecution. Those who enabled him — in both parties — block investigations into what was done. Ruth Marcus and Cass Sunstein and friends offer one excuse after the next to justify this immunity. But the powerless and defenseless — though definitively courageous — public servant who blew the whistle on this lawbreaking is harassed, investigated, and pursued by the DOJ’s Criminal Division to the point of bankruptcy and depression, while the lawbreakers and their enablers stand by mute and satisfied.
