Trials Without Crimes Or Evidence
April 25, 2012
| Original here
A fish rots from the head
Andy Worthington is a superb reporter who has specialized in
providing the facts of the US government’s illegal abuse of “detainees,”
against whom no evidence exists. (
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/ )
In an effort to create evidence, the US government has illegally
resorted to torture. Torture produces false confessions, plea bargains,
and false testimony against others in order to escape further torture.
For these reasons, in Anglo-American law self-incrimination secured
through torture has been impermissible evidence for centuries. So also
has been secret evidence withheld from the accused and his attorney.
Secret evidence cannot be confronted. Secret evidence is distrusted as
made-up in order to convict the innocent. The evidence is secret because
it cannot stand the light of day.
The US government relies on secret evidence in its cases against
alleged terrorists, claiming that national security would be threatened
if the evidence were revealed. This is abject nonsense. It is an
absurd claim that presenting evidence against a terrorist jeopardizes
the national security of the United States.
To the contrary, not presenting evidence jeopardizes the security of
each and every one of us. Once the government can convict defendants on
the basis of secret evidence, even the concept of a fair trial will
disappear. Fair trials are already history, but the concept lingers.
Secret evidence murders the concept of a fair trial. It murders
justice and the rule of law. Secret evidence means anyone can be
convicted of anything. As in Kafka’s The Trial,
people will cease to know the crimes for which they are being tried and convicted.
This extraordinary development in Anglo-American law, a development
demanded by the unaccountable Bush/Obama Regime, has not resulted in
impeachment proceedings; nor has it caused an uproar from Congress, the
federal courts, the presstitute media, law schools, constitutional
scholars, and bar associations.
Having bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory, Americans just
want someone to pay. They don’t care who as long as someone pays. To
accommodate this desire, the government has produced some “high value
detainees” with Arab or Muslim names.
But instead of bringing these alleged malefactors to trial and
presenting evidence against them, the government has kept them in
torture dungeons for years trying to create through the application of
pain and psychological breakdown guilt by self-incrimination in order to
create a case against them.
The government has been unsuccessful and has nothing that it can
bring to a real court. So the Bush/Obama Regime created and recreated
“military tribunals” to lend “national security” credence to the
absolute need that non-existent evidence be kept secret.
Andy Worthington in his numerous reports does a good job in providing
the history of the detainees and their treatment. He deserves our
commendation and support. But what I want to do is to ask some
questions, not of Worthington, but about the idea that the US is under
terrorist threat.
By this September, 9/11 will be eleven years ago. Yet despite the
War on Terror, the loss of Americans’ privacy and civil liberties, an
expenditure of trillions of dollars on numerous wars, violations of US
and international laws against torture, and so forth, no one has been
held accountable. Neither the perpetrators nor those whom the
perpetrators outwitted, assuming that they are different people, have
been held accountable. Going on 11 years and no trials of villains or
chastisement of negligent public officials. This is remarkable.
The government’s account of 9/11 implies massive failure of all US
security and intelligence agencies along with those of our NATO puppets
and Israel’s Mossad.
The government’s official line also implies the failure of the National
Security Council, NORAD and the US Air Force, Air Traffic Control,
Airport Security four times in one hour on the same morning. It implies
the failure of the President, the Vice President, the National Security
Adviser, the Secretary of Defense.
Many on the left and also libertarians find this apparent failure of
the centralized and oppressive government so hopeful that they cling to
the official “government failure” explanation of 9/11. However, such
massive failure is simply unbelievable. How in the world could the US
have survived the cold war with the Soviets if the US government were so
totally incompetent?
If we attribute superhero powers to the 19 alleged hijackers, powers
in excess of V’s in V for Vendetta or James Bond’s or Captain Marvel’s,
and assume that these young terrorists, primarily Saudi Arabians,
outwitted Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Tony
Blair, along with the CIA, FBI, MI5 and MI6, Mossad, etc., one would
have expected for the President, Congress, and the media to call for
heads to roll. No more humiliating affront has ever been suffered by a
major power than the US suffered on 9/11. Yet, absolutely no one, not
even some lowly traffic controller, was scapegoated and held accountable
for what is considered to be the most extraordinarily successful
terrorist attack in human history, an attack so successful that it
implies total negligence across the totality of the US government and
that of all its allies.
This just doesn’t smell right. Total failure and no accountability.
The most expensively funded security apparatus the world has ever known
defeated by a handful of Saudi Arabians. How can anyone in the CIA,
FBI, NSA, NORAD, and National Security Council hold up their heads? What
a disgraced bunch of jerks and incompetents.
What do we need them for?
Consider the alleged hijackers. Despite allegedly being caught off
guard by the 9/11 attacks, the FBI was soon able to identify the 19
hijackers despite the fact that apparently none of the alleged
hijackers’ names are on the passenger lists of the airliners that they
allegedly hijacked.
How did 19 passengers get on airplanes in the US without being on the passenger lists?
I do not personally know if the alleged hijackers were on the four
airliners. Moreover, defenders of the official 9/11 story claim that the
passenger lists released to the public were “victims lists,” not
passenger lists, because the names of the hijackers were withheld and
only released some four years later after 9/11 researchers had had years
in which to confuse victims lists with passenger lists. This seems an
odd explanation. Why encourage public misinformation for years by
withholding the passenger lists and issuing victims lists in their
place? It cannot have been to keep the hijackers’ names a secret as the
FBI released a list of the hijackers several days after 9/11. Even
more puzzling, if the hijackers’ names were on the airline passenger
lists, why did it take the FBI several days to confirm the names and
numbers of hijackers?
Researchers have found contradictions in the FBI’s accounts of the
passenger lists with the FBI adding and subtracting names from its
various lists and some names being misspelled, indicating possibly that
the FBI doesn’t really know who the person is. The authenticity of the
passenger lists that were finally released in 2005 is contested, and the
list apparently was not presented as evidence by the FBI in the
Moussaoui trial in 2006. David Ray Griffin has extensively researched
the 9/11 story. In one of his books, 9/11 Ten Years Later, Griffin
writes: “Although the FBI claimed that it had received flight manifests
from the airlines by the morning of 9/11, the ‘manifests’ that appeared
in 2005 had names that were not known to the FBI until a day or more
after 9/11. These 2005 ‘manifests,’ therefore, could not have been the
original manifests for the four 9/11 flights.”
The airlines themselves have not been forthcoming. We are left with
the mystery of why simple and straightforward evidence, such as a list
of passengers, was withheld for years and mired in secrecy and
controversy.
We have the additional problem that the BBC and subsequently other
news organizations established that 6 or 7 of the alleged hijackers on
the FBI’s list are alive and well and have never been part of any
terrorist plot.
These points are not even a beginning of the voluminous reasons that the government’s 9/11 story looks very thin.
But the American public, being throughly plugged into the Matrix, are
not suspicious of the government’s thin story. Instead, they are
suspicious of the facts and of those experts who are suspicious of the
government’s story. Architects, engineers, scientists, first responders,
pilots, and former public officials who raise objections to the
official story are written off as conspiracy theorists. Why does an
ignorant American public think it knows more than experts? Why do
Americans believe a government that told them the intentional lie that
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction despite the fact that the
weapons inspectors reported to President Bush that Hussein had no such
weapons? And now we see the same thing all over again with the alleged,
but non-existent, Iranian nukes.
As Frantz Fanon wrote, the power of cognitive dissonance is extreme.
It keeps people comfortable and safe from threatening information. Most
Americans find the government’s lies preferable to the truth. They don’t
want to be unplugged from the Matrix. The truth is too uncomfortable
for emotionally and mentally weak Americans.
Worthington focuses on the harm being done to detainees. They have
been abused for much of their lives. Their innocence or guilt cannot be
established because the evidence is compromised by torture,
self-incrimination, and coerced testimony against others. They stand
convicted by the government’s accusation alone. These are real wrongs,
and Worthington is correct to emphasize them.
In contrast, my focus is on the harm to America, on the harm to truth
and truth’s power, on the harm to the rule of law and accountability to
the people of the government and its agencies, on the harm to the moral
fabric of the US government and to liberty in the United States.
As the adage goes, a fish rots from the head. As the government rots, so does the United States of America.
