In any just society, former CIA operative Jose Rodriquez would be charged as a war criminal, put on trial, and if convicted, sentenced to a long prison term for carrying out torture and then destroying evidence.
But in our current society, people like him have been granted immunity by the current administration because president Obama conveniently likes to let bygones be bygones and “look forward, not backward” when it comes to prosecuting war crimes. So Rodriquez writes a book boasting about his deeds and goes on national TV to hawk it, facing soft-ball questions from our allegedly hard-hitting intrepid journalists.
Rodriguez is following in the footsteps of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush who also brag about authorizing torture and have suffered no consequences.
As Glenn Greenwald says, this situation is arising because we have seen the steady decline of the federal judiciary. Such people are given lifetime appointments in order to enable them to act independently and impartially but they seem to have become so deferential towards the exercise of extraordinary executive power, and so unwilling to protect people’s constitutional rights, that coupled with the executive branch’s unwillingness to prosecute criminal acts has resulted in people like Rodriguez feeling that they have the freedom to do what they want as long as it is in the name of ‘national security’.
“As Glenn Greenwald says, this situation is arising because we have seen the steady decline of the federal judiciary. Such people are given lifetime appointments in order to enable them to act independently and impartially…”
The flaw in the system is that they have become (if not have always been) political appointments. They don’t have to fear getting kicked out into the street, but they did have to demonstrate pandering to the powers that nominate.
And those powers, from either party, are corporately backed. It isn’t so much that the federal judiciary are working against citizens, it’s just that they are making decisions based on the thoughts that made them acceptable to the corporately backed powers to be nominated in the first place.
For me, this is just another aspect of the special case of plutocracy (corporatocracy) that is becoming more and more of a reality in our lives.
Exactly. Just “sophisticated” corruption.
I’m not sure, in the USA, that an elected federal judiciary would do anything better or differently. Standing up for the rights of accused terrorists isn’t exactly a populist action in most places, and especially in the States.