As the criminals sip their martinis...

[Bjorn Against]

When I was a child I was told that we lived in a country that respected human rights. We didn’t have to worry about our government rounding people up in the dead of night and sending them off to a secret prison half way around the globe because we had a Constitution that protected everyone’s rights, and if any of our leaders ever tried to violate that Constitution they would be held accountable.

Well that Constitution was violated, and the people who violated it are now sitting in their luxury homes enjoying their martinis as they reminisce about the days in which they authorized the torture of an Iraqi teenager who they had rounded up. The criminals sit in their hot tubs and smile as they think about the secret prisons they established in which they sent people of Arabic descent to be treated under a different and much harsher set of laws that was applied almost exclusively to this one particular ethnic group, and then the laughter begins when the topic turns to the private conversations they listened to through their illegal wiretaps.

But while the people who committed these crimes against the Constitution go on their yacht rides I am still trying to remember those days of my childhood in which I was told that we were a nation that respected human rights. In those days I believed that if you got caught ordering the torture of another human being you would be sent to prison, it didn’t matter who you were nobody was above the law not even the President of the United States.

Apparently what I was taught in school does not apply today however, because when I look at who is going to the Country Clubs right now I am seeing a whole bunch of criminals who spent the past eight years shredding the Constitution and bankrupting America. There are former White House officials who allowed torture, there are bankers who stole billions of dollars and destroyed this nation’s economy for their own personal enrichment, there are government officials who are gossiping about the juicy information they learned from their illegal warrantless wiretaps, and there are officials who lied to Congress in order to justify a war that has now killed over four thousand Americans and nearly a million Iraqis.

Yet we are being told that these people should not even be charged with criminal acts because to do so would be divisive. We are told that we are supposed to look forward not back, and we are supposed to just move on because we don’t want to upset the people who support these criminals.

And yet while we are supposed to move on and forgive the people who committed torture and other grave crimes against humanity we are not supposed to forgive the black kid who is sitting in prison because he got caught with a joint. The kid who was caught with the joint will have to finish his mandatory minimum sentence and then have his criminal record follow him around for the rest of his life, but the person who stole billions and authorized the use of torture will continue to sip his martini while he relaxes on his luxury yacht.

Is this the country we want to live in? A country in which the rich and powerful are able to commit grave crimes which irreparably harm this nation while the less fortunate are faced with draconian prison sentences if they are even caught in possession of a plant? When the criminals who have harmed all of us are roaming the country clubs freely while entire inner city communities have been torn apart because so many of their residents are in prison it is time to seriously reevaluate whether our justice system is truly just. As long as Bush, Cheney, and all the administration officials and corporate executives who participated in their criminal acts roam free then there is no justice and no amount of rhetoric about looking forward and not back will ever change that.

[Bjorn Against]

1. And just to be clear this issue is not going away...

There is no statute of limitations on murder and there are 4,000 dead Americans as well as a million dead Iraqis. We are not going to be silent until the people responsible for these deaths are behind bars.