September 10, 2012

Nation of Lawless

Yesterday's New York Times reported that the U.S. is moving to protect former Mexico President Ernesto Zedillo from a civil lawsuit in Connecticut (Zedillo lectures at Yale) concerning a massacre in Chiapas in 1997 during his term: "The State Department said Mr. Zedillo should have immunity because the suit, filed in federal court in Connecticut, concerned actions taken in his official capacity, which generally allow heads of state freedom from the hook of American courts."

As the Chicago Tribune reported last week, the U.S. is refusing an extradition request from Bolivia for former President Sanchez de Lozada to stand trial for the death of 63 protesters in 2003, soon after which de Lozada fled to the U.S.

About a week before, as the Washington Post reported, the U.S. Justice Department ended its investigation of CIA torturers with no plans for prosecution.

And a couple weeks earlier, the Obama-Biden campaign "Truth Team" boasted: "The Obama administration has prosecuted twice as many cases under the Espionage Act as all other administrations combined."

Except for the first one, Glenn Greenwald has written about all of these at The Guardian, and himself reported the last one.

Also read Greenwald on the latest death in the Guantánamo prison: “In the hierarchy of evil, consigning someone who has been convicted of nothing to a cage year after year after year, until they die, is high up on the list. And in that regard, this latest episode demonstrates not only the ongoing travesty of the US’s war on terror policies, but also the dishonesty of the attempt to exonerate Obama for those policies.’

Here is an excerpt on Youtube from John Pilger about the fall of de Lozada.

human rights, anarchism