DOJ Confused: Is Rape Really a Crime?
A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident. Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.Sounds like a serious crime to me. Or rather, several: Assault. Rape. False imprisonment. All crimes which the DOJ is empowered to prosecute if they occur in Iraq and involve contractors. It’s the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, or MEJA.
“Don’t plan on working back in Iraq. There won’t be a position here, and there won’t be a position in Houston,” Jones says she was told.
But in the eyes of the Bush Justice Department, contractors functioning in Iraq have complete immunity for whatever crimes they choose to commit. The U.S. issued a decree preventing the Iraqis from prosecuting. And the Justice Department isn’t going to do a thing about them. As one assistant attorney general explained to me in the corridors of the Rayburn Building, “we simply don’t have the resources or time to deal with this sort of thing.”
Of course. When you dedicate 58 FBI agents (one of them recalled from Iraq just for that purpose) to a raid on a law office whose principals are under strong suspicion of raising money for Democratic presidential candidates and reimbursing staffers who make donations, then it only stands to reason that you have no resources to deal with the rape of a woman from Texas, or a group of Blackwater guards who needlessly murder 17 civilians at Nisoor Square. Or when you spend over $5 million on a bogus political prosecution of a Democratic governor, using evidence which is (as we will discover in the next two weeks) completely false. Or when you spend about $10 million on a series of trials in Mississippi which have the principal objective not of law enforcement, but of bankrupting the treasury of the Democratic Party. All of this shows what the priorities are: politics. Especially electoral politics. Dirty tricks designed to advance a G.O.P. electoral agenda. Murder, rape, assault? What is that by comparison? Unimportant. Trivial Stuff. Welcome to the Bush Justice Department.
Dan Abrams
This week MS-NBC’s “Live with Dan Abrams” is featuring a special series entitled “Bush League Justice.” The first installment featured the destruction of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. It will be hard to get through all of this in just five hours. On Thursday, Dan will come to focus on political prosecutions. The case of America’s most prominent political prisoner, Alabama’s former Governor Don E. Siegelman, will be examined in some depth—along with others. Make a point of checking in and learn what the Birmingham News doesn’t want you to know.
Javert Returns to Centerstage
Siegelman prosecutor Louis V. Franklin is back in the center of another politically charged case. Sources in the Montgomery U.S. Attorney’s Office state that Leura Canary has put her most trusted political prosecutor in charge of a grand jury proceeding that Canary launched. The target is apparently an insurance executive who raised corruption allegations targeting two of Mrs. Canary’s husband’s clients. Apparently making accusations against clients of the Canary household is a crime down in Montgomery.
Incestuous Prosecutions in Alabama
Raw Story’s Larisa Alexandrovna discusses the Siegelman case on Ring of Fire. She starts her account with how Siegelman was defeated in 2002, and the key role played by Alabama Attorney General William Pryor in blocking the counting of the votes in Baldwin County, so that Pryor’s friend and Bill Canary’s client, Bob Riley, could be declared victor by a 3,000 vote margin that statisticians call “not improbable but impossible.” Larisa goes on to describe the key role played in the corrupt prosecution of Siegelman by Karl Rove, Rove’s close friend, Bill Canary, and Canary’s wife, Leura, the U.S. Attorney who brought the case against Siegelman. It’s all a case of acute political incest, says Alexandrovna. Read the transcript here.
Return to A.M. in the Morning! Home
4 comments:
I shake my head in dismay when I stop and think about what the Bush administration has done to this country. From New Orleans to Baghdad this bunch has screwed things up. They've turned their backs on the American people and used the trust the Supreme Court granted them to pillage, plunder and abuse the nation's moral and financial wealth. They're metaphorically raping this country everyday. Unfortunately Jamie Leigh Jones is not a metaphor, but rather a living breathing by product of their work.
I spent quite a bit of time in Central America before I sailed in Florida waters and whenever I'd meet people I'd make a point of letting them know that I didn't vote for George Bush and I didn't appreciate what he was doing to my country.
Tadpushy, I always enjoy your comments. Thoughtful, thought provoking, and resonating with my own perspective.
Thanks for reading A.M. in the Morning!
The three largest newspapers plus the Internet site al.com in Alabama are all owned by Advance Publications, INC. They literally print nothing but lies about all Democrats in the state. They will not allow their investigative reporters any access to these cases. If they would have investigated and printed the truth about Don Siegelman like many of the locally own papers have done the Canary's would have been run out of the state by its citizens before now.
It has taken a few months, but most Alabamians now know the truth about their good friend Don Siegelman, about the conspiracy that removed the most popular Democrat in Alabama by Bush's appointees and how his elections were taken from him.
These three newspaper instruct their writers to start every article that they write about Siegelman with this statement, "our newspapers endorsed Riley and we believe Siegelman to be a crook" then they twist every sentence after that to sound negative.
Many of us are dropping our subscriptions and are switching to locally owned newspapers.
I am greaved about the polical corruption that is happening in Alabama. It has gotten to be like the old bad lands before annexation into statehood. The state is controlled by crooks.
Political corruption in Alabama has gotten totally out of control. Out of the Millions of dollars of Mississippi Choctaw money that Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon laundered and sent to AL. to defeat Siegelman’s Education Lottery in 1999, to elect Bob Riley in 2002 and for Riley to oppress the AL. Poarch Indians, “not a single person has gotten investigated by the ABI or FBI under direction of the offices of the Alabama Attorney General or the U.S. Attorneys.”
Every article written on the 2002 Governors election verifies that the numbers published indicates that Electronic ballot stuffing was involved in Baldwin County to transfer votes from Siegelman to Riley. Siegelman was the winner that evening; however, Dan Gans (Riley’s voting machine software guru) said that Siegelman had too may votes in Bay Minette so during the night a voting adjustment was made that put Riley in the lead. I believe that Siegelman was blackmailed because he didn't put up a fight when votes were swapped and the election was taken from him. No one knew why he conceded to Riley until the Judicial Committee released Attorney Jill Simpson‘s testimony this week. The Democratic Party issued petitions in all 67 counties asking for recounts (not all counties used optical scanning machines), but in Baldwin County in particular, they actually asked for a manual recount (of the paper ballots); however, Alabama Attorney General William Pryor ordered that throughout the state that all votes be sealed. He told the county canvassing boards that under penalty of law they did not have the authority to break the seals on the ballots and machines under section 17-9-31 of the constitution to do a recount. This 2002 election fraud didn't get investigated by the ABI or FBI or the offices of the U.S. Attorneys or the Alabama Attorney General.
Post a Comment