Double Punishment, Double Jeopardy
The last week has been pretty disturbing for those of us who hope to see our country restored and its moral center reestablished. President Obama decided to participate in the torture cover up and, at the CIA and Republican’s behest, blocked the release of pictures showing torture. Then he decided to prosecute the victims of US torture in military tribunals. Military tribunals, hell. Kangaroo courts.
I think he’s afraid of the CIA. He should be. There’s evidence that Bush 41, with the help of CIA agents and assets, assassinated President Kennedy. Kennedy had threatened to break up the CIA and scatter it to the wind. He fired two CIA directors. He refused to okay Operation Northwards. He refused to use the Bay of Pigs, which he was only told about a couple of hours before it began, as an excuse to invade Cuba. He refused to send planes to support it. All those things made the CIA and the Miami Cubans very angry at him. Thus they were willing to kill him and did.
President Jimmy Carter came into office promising to clean up the CIA and stop its excesses. It is said he fired 800 CIA agents. Many of these agents immediately became assets of the GOP and use their skills to fix the election of 1980 thus putting Reagan and Bush 41 in office.
The CIA has more power than we know and much more power than it should.
Both Obama and his mother are said to have been CIA assets and perhaps CIA agents. At least they both worked, at different times, for a corporation that was known to be a CIA front, the Business International Corporation (one of whose specialties was recruiting leaders of domestic left-wing organizations as CIA assets).
So Obama may know enough about the CIA to be afraid of it but I find it very sad that he has to be, that he can not do right because of the power of evil men.
I’m particularly disturbed at the prospect of trying prisoners who have already been punished. It’s a kind of double jeopardy.
You know, from time to time we will read about a police officer or some other government official who appears to have done something wrong or illegal and is put on paid suspension while his guilt and punishment is decided. And many people think, why didn’t they just fire him? It comes down to punishment and the law. You only get one punishment for one infraction. If a police officer punches a citizen without justification and is immediately fired and no longer receives his pay his union will appeal the punishment. If they prove that he had some justification for his actions he has to be rehired without any further punishment because he has already been punished once when he lost his salary when he was fired. So instead, they suspend people like that, keep on paying them, so when they come to punish them they can. If their employer punishes them once by withholding their salary, they can’t be punished again for the same thing.
The people held by the Bush administration have already been punished. Some of them have been water boarded 88 times, probably worse than a death sentence, or 88 death sentences. So even if they are found guilty they should be released because they have already been punished. It is not right to punish them twice for the same offense. It is a kind of double jeopardy. Personally I think they should be released with a considerable amount of money to pay for their suffering, and watched. Then, if they commit another offense against the United States, they could be tried in a real court.
Let’s hope President Obama figures out a way to get the CIA under control so he is in charge, not them, and that all torture victims go free, are compensated and their torturers spend the rest of their lives in jail.
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© Alllie 2009
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