thedailybell.com / By Paul Craig Roberts / January 31, 2013
In the 21st century Americans have experienced an extraordinary collapse in the rule of law and in their constitutional protections. Today American citizens, once a free people protected by law, can be assassinated and detained in prison indefinitely without any evidence being presented to a court of their guilt, and they can be sentenced to prison on the basis of secret testimony by anonymous witnesses not subject to cross examination. The US “justice system” has been transformed by the Bush/Obama regime into the “justice system” of Gestapo Germany and Stalinist Russia. There is no difference.
In an article available at Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Stephen Downs, formerly Chief Attorney with the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct, and Kathy Manley, a criminal defense attorney and member of the New York Civil Liberties Union, report on how the US government destroyed a charity, the Holy Land Foundation, which provided money for feeding the poor and for building schools and hospitals in Palestine.
The charity, aware of the perils of being based in the US and doing anything for Palestinians, relied on the US State Department and the US Department of Justice (sic) for guidance on where to send humanitarian aid. The charity sent its aid to the same aid committees in Palestine that the US Agency for International Development and the UN used to distribute aid to the Palestinians.
In the first trial of the Holy Land Foundation, the US government admitted that none of the charity’s donations had gone to terrorist organizations and the federal prosecutors failed to achieve a conviction. So the prosecutors tried the charity again.
In the second trial, the judge permitted the prosecutors to call an “anonymous expert” to tell the jury that some of the committees used by USAID and the UN and approved by the US Department of State were controlled by Hamas, the elected government of Palestine that Israel requires the US government to brand as “terrorist.”
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