Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Dear Mr. President,

In yesterday’s New York Times, there were several articles about the Justice Department quietly dropping a number of high-profile corruption cases against members of Congress. The double standard of justice, one for the rich and powerful, and another for the rest of us, has always been there, but it seemed to become more pronounced under the Bush regime and is no less under your own. Right from the start you said any prosecution of the Bush administration war criminals was off the table. I suppose this was an effort to placate your Republican enemies but it was very unsettling and the first indication that you would simply carry on the same double standard of justice as your predecessor. A stark example of this is the ongoing incarceration of Pfc. Bradley Manning. While the Justice Department has dropped cases against Senator Ensign and representatives Lewis, Young and DeLay, and while Scooter Libbey spent not a single night in jail for a federal crime or for obstruction of justice - for which he was found guilty - Pfc. Bradley Manning, a U.S. citizen and a U.S. soldier, has been held for seven months in solitary confinement in a Marine brig without being convicted of a crime. This is not only immoral and unjustified, but cruel and unusual punishment - torture - defined as illegal under the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution. Further, while lawyers at the Justice Department are doing everything in their power to come up with a crime with which to charge Julian Assange and suppress WikiLeaks, Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, et. al, were not charged with a single one of the many war crimes and crimes against humanity they committed. The Attorney General talks about holding people accountable when it comes to WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange, but not when it comes to banks and bankers and Wall Street tycoons who wreaked havoc on the American people. No one was held accountable for the economic collapse or the misery that still goes on in foreclosures (many erroneous and illegal) on millions of American homeowners - more than a million by Bank of America alone. Those same folks got bailed out by the U.S. treasury so they didn’t lose their fat paychecks or bonuses, but the rest of us are subjected to the fallout that resulted from their greed and incompetence. Just a daily litany of small injustices, Mr. President, from which you are immune, probably unaware, and probably of no concern to you and yours, but a corrosive acid on democracy. Merry Christmas.