Candace

Talmadge

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August 18, 2008

Mukasey’s Minions: Republican Means Never Having to Be Accountable

That’s it. The U.S. Justice Department is tainted and its prosecutions meaningless. Save the taxpayers a lot of money and just disband the entire circus before the wheels come off.

The preceding is predicated on the strange inaction of the nation’s top law enforcement officer, U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Declining to pursue current and former Justice Department officials for their rule-bending roles in politicizing the process of hiring career civil servants, Mukasey instead wants to turn state and local police departments into spies for the federal government.

Maybe his lack of zeal is not so odd after all. According to Scott Horton in Harper’s Magazine, before being confirmed as Attorney General, Mukasey attended a meeting arranged by the White House. There he assured a group of conservatives that he would not appoint any special prosecutors to pursue administration figures involved in serious Justice Department scandals, such as politically motivated hiring and firing, not to mention those memos to provide cover for torture.

Muskasey is at least a man of his word. “. . . Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime,” he said at the recent annual meeting of the American Bar Association. He was referring to the findings of two Justice Department Inspector General’s reports on the highly partisan hiring practices of Monica Goodling, Michael Elston and Esther McDonald, all reporting to former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Up is down. Black is white. Love means never having to say you’re sorry and Republican means never having to be held accountable.

Accountability? Don’t you know? Only the little people face accountability. The late Leona Helmsley was referring to taxes and little people when she was quoted during her tax-evasion trial two decades ago. “Little people,” of course, refers to you and me, without the right sort of political connections or the right sort of financial clout.

“Little people,” however, are precisely the ones most vulnerable to Mukasey’s soon-to-be unleashed state and local cops – the spies like us who live in our neighborhoods and work in our town and cities.

The Justice Department has proposed regulation changes to allowing state and local law enforcement agencies to target groups as well as individuals, and to launch criminal intelligence investigations based on the mere suspicion that the target is involved in terrorism or providing material support to terrorists.

The new regulations permit state and local police to share their intelligence findings with a wide range of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies as well as other, undefined federal departments.

How scary is this: The locals joining the feds in warrantless spying on anyone they don’t like. Think it hasn’t happened already? Even without these expanded regulations, New York police infiltrated protest groups before the 2004 Republican National Convention; Maryland State Police spied on death penalty opponents and antiwar organizations in 2005 and 2006; Denver police pursued Amnesty International members; the California state cops have eavesdropped on animal rights, labor and peace activists.

The preceding are just the known abuses of power by state and local police. Once Mukasey and the Bush Administration are done, you and I – “the little people” – will have a lot more to fear from our own law enforcers than we do any terrorist. In fact, now that the local and state police will be spying for the CIA, DOD, FBI, NSA and the entire federal agency alphabet soup, do not give any of them squat. Don’t cooperate. Don’t volunteer a word – not even the time of day. Your very freedom and life could depend on it.

The Justice Department’s Inspector General has yet to release the findings of another probe into the politically motivated sacking of nine U.S. attorneys. It’s a safe bet that Mukasey won’t see any wrongdoing in this instance, either, no matter what the report actually says.

Rest assured, however, that any “little people” who protest government policies or advocate an unpopular viewpoint will find the Bush Administration’s own version of Big Brother breathing down their necks and hauling them off to the slammer, where they will be named as “enemy combatants” and held indefinitely without trial.

Feel safer now?

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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