Justice System

For a Change of Pace and Ironic Justice: Kerry Spokesman Stripped of Silver Star

tiredoflibbs9 Comments

John F. Kerry almost became president running on the basis of his alleged heroism in Vietnam. Thanks to the efforts of a group of truth-tellers, the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, the serious holes in the fantasy narrative propounded by the Kerry campaign came to the attention of enough Americans that John Kerry was not the first faux-Irish President of the United States.

One of Kerry’s enablers in propounding his imaginary heroism was a man named Wade Sanders, who himself held a Silver Star, and who introduced Kerry to the Democratic Convention. Scott Swett, who was central to the unraveling of the Kerry storyline, tells us that the Kerry enabler has been exposed for what he is. His Winter Soldier site has the details:

John Kerry was introduced at the 2004 Democratic National Convention by Wade Sanders, a retired Navy Captain and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy who served as a Swift Boat officer in Vietnam. Like Kerry, Sanders was the recipient of a Silver Star for gallantry in action. During the 2004 campaign, Sanders functioned as Kerry lead attack dog against the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, repeatedly denouncing the veterans on the air as liars and comparing them to Nazi propagandists.

Wade Sanders is now in Federal prison, serving a 37-month sentence for possessing child pornography. Now the Navy Times reports that Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus has revoked Sanders’ Silver Star. The highly unusual decision appears unrelated to Sanders’ felony conviction. A Navy spokesman cited “subsequently determined facts and evidence surrounding both the incident for which the award was made and the processing of the award itself.” John Kerry has to be hoping this doesn’t become a trend.

As one might imagine, the media has ignored this story. Even the Navy Times declined to post its own article online.

HAT TIP: The American Thinker and Thomas Lifson

UPDATE: Here is the Sanders sentencing memorandum. Horrific.

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I have a prediction….. let’s wait to see if it comes true.


Guilty No Matter What

Mark Noonan8 Comments

That is our new legal principle, at least at the University of North Dakota:

In a stark demonstration of the failure of campus judicial procedures, the University of North Dakota (UND) has found a student guilty of sexual assault despite the fact that local police refused to charge him with a crime and instead charged his accuser for lying about the incident. Former student Caleb Warner has been banned by UND from stepping foot on any state public campus for three years. Meanwhile, his accuser has been wanted by the Grand Forks Sheriff’s Department for more than a year on the charge of making a false report to law enforcement…

It seems that Uncle Sam – carrying out the liberal mandate – has decided that all colleges receiving federal funds must use a “preponderance of evidence” rather than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard for judging such cases.  In this case it does seem that an accusation is “preponderance of evidence” because if there was something beyond the accuser’s statement it is highly unlike that the regular law enforcement agencies would have charged the accuser with lying, even if they lacked sufficient evidence to convict the accused.  Beyond the outrage of what amounts to a kangaroo court convicting the accused there lies the double outrage in the college’s refusal to reopen the case in light of the charge of lying leveled against the accuser.

In the end, this is the result of all that liberal nonsense about political correctness, “hate crimes” and “zero tolerance”.  In their zeal to enforce liberal ideas, the very concepts of truth and justice have been jettisoned.  It will take extreme legal and political pressure to get the college to reverse course…and even if they are in this case, you can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll still go forward trying to enforce the liberal view.

How to fix this?  Simple:  prohibit the federal government from setting rules in colleges.  Go ahead and spend federal money if you like, but don’t go dictating how it is to be spent.  In other words, if money is to be spent it had better just be in the form of bloc grants (best calculated on a per-student basis) which is then dispensed to the colleges to use as they wish…scholarships, new facilities, slush funds for the faculty, what have you.  Better to have the money mis-allocated by some schools than to have all schools come under the thumb of liberal fascism.   Most places would use it properly and those which did would swiftly earn the better reputation and thus draw in more students…and thus more funding.  But get Uncle Sam out of it…all he can do is screw it up, as we see here in this case.

Barack Milhous Obama

Mark Noonan3 Comments

What did he know and when did he know it?

It must be pointed out that no lives were lost in Watergate – while we’ve got one dead American in the “Gunwalker” scandal…and who knows how many Mexicans might wind up dead.  And all we’re getting from Obama’s “Justice” Department is stonewalling…the truth has to come out, we must find out what happened – who ordered it, who knew about it and what was the real purpose?

Remember what happened here – American law enforcement agencies connived at the sale and transport of American arms to Mexican drug cartels.  This is not something which just comes out of some cop’s head – someone very senior in the Obama Administration cooked up the plan and I cannot imagine it going forward with out AG Holder’s permission, at least.

The people have a right to know – and Congress must continue to press this issue and go where ever the evidence leads.

The Growing “Gunwalker” Scandal

Mark Noonan7 Comments

From Katie Pavlich at Townhall:

Yesterday, Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson answered questions from Rep. Darrell Issa and Senator Charles Grassley surrounding Operation Fast and Furious…

…Melson revealed the scope of Operation Fast and Furious reaches far beyond ATF and the Justice Department. He said the FBI, DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) and other agencies were heavily involved…

Do read the whole thing – it shows that this scandal may reach not only very high in the Justice Department, but across many of our law enforcement agencies.  It is quite a tangled web – and we should have a special prosecutor appointed and/or form a Congressional committee to air the whole, sorry mess.

Holder’s Justice Department has routinely ignored the law since Obama appointed him in 2009 – just in the fact that he refused to prosecuted the Panthers over 2008 voter intimidation demonstrated Holder’s unfitness to be our senior law enforcement official…the Gunwalker scandal is ample justification to demand Holder’s resignation as well as the resignation of any other agency head who knew of this idiotic plan and failed to stop it.

To me, this is likely just the tip of a large, nasty ice berg and we must get to the bottom of it.  I don’t trust Holder and while he’s in charge of Justice I don’t trust our federal law enforcement agencies.  A clean sweep has to be made and we need to find who who knew what and when.

The Casey Anthony Verdict: Why is it Illegal to Lie to the Cops?

Mark Noonan13 Comments

I figured that the jury would come back with “not guilty” on the murder charge – though I thought there was a good chance they’d find her guilty of manslaughter; but that only because she’s clearly guilty of something in the death of her child…but I didn’t think guilty of murder; certainly not provably guilty of murder.  We don’t even know how the child died – so how can their be a murder charge?  For all we know the child really did die of an accident and then Ms. Anthony went in to panic mode…the rest is tragic history.

But now that the jury has ruled, I want to take issue with what she was found guilty of: lying to the police.  In my view, there is something just wrong about being found guilty of lying about a crime you didn’t commit.  Remember, she was ruled not guilty – the jury says she didn’t do it.  That is the end of it as far as the death of her child goes.  To now hold her responsible for lying to the police just doesn’t come across to me as an action of justice.

I don’t blame the jury in this – from what I can tell, she not only lied to the police, but lied a lot…and to a lot of people.  I further understand that lying under oath is a very serious crime (for which, incidentally, Bill Clinton should have been removed from office; so serious is the crime)…but I don’t think she was under oath in the interrogation room.  Sure, she should have just kept her mouth shut or told the absolute truth…but she is also a young, irresponsible girl who has a dead child to account for; in such a situation it can easily seem that lying is the best course (it never really is – this is no justification for lying; just a statement that lying, in and of itself, perhaps should not be prosecutable).  All such convictions do is ensure that anyone who watched the trial now knows what to do – shut up, shut up and shut up some more.

Quite simply, if you are ever arrested – even for something you absolutely know you didn’t do – you should just say nothing to the police.  Don’t even give your  name without your attorney present.  You might even make an honest mistake and wind up convicted for lying to the police over it.  How many of us, suddenly hauled in to a police station, could be certain we’d lay out a complete story with no inconsistencies or errors?  And once you’ve made an error, how do you convince the authorities that it was just an error and now you’d like to correct the record after you’ve had a chance to review in your mind the sequence of events?  The charge of lying to the police is a trap that only the most clear minded person completely familiar with the law can possibly avoid.

The police and prosecutors should not have this ability to convict us of lying to them – that should be taken away.  As long as you aren’t solemnly swearing to it, then it isn’t a lie in the legal sense.  At least, that is my view.