“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Trevor Timm: If Eric Garner’s killer can’t be indicted, what cop possibly could? It’s time to fix grand juries
Grand juries were designed to be a check on prosecutors and law enforcement. Instead, they’ve become a corrupt shield to protect those with power and another sword to strike down those without. And it’s now all too obviously past time the system was overhauled to fix that.
Before Wednesday’s shameful decision by a New York grand jury to refuse to indict the police officer who choked to death an unarmed and unresisting Eric Garner, one statistic made clear just how much our justice system has failed:
Grand juries not resulting in indictments: Police Officers: 80 of 81 Civilians: 11 of 162,000
If you are an ordinary citizen being investigated for a crime by an American grand jury, there is a 99.993% chance you’ll be indicted. Yet if you’re a police officer, that chance falls to effectively nil.
While the Michael Brown tragedy in Ferguson elevated the harsh reality of grand juries to the global stage, no case has driven it home more than Garner’s. A victim who was unarmed and did not resist. A forbidden chokehold according to NYPD rules. Ruled a homicide by the medical examiner who performed the autopsy. And it was all caught on crystal-clear video.
Marcy Wheeler: The Government’s Flawed Single-Source Theory of Investigative Journalism
As reported by ExposeFacts last month, former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling wants to show that several of the key witnesses against him (including his superior at CIA) have themselves mishandled classified information. A government filing (pdf) released last month provides more details about Sterling’s claims, revealing that four witnesses who were cleared into the Merlin Program revealed in James Risen’s book have mishandled classified information, taking documents home improperly.
The government’s argument explaining why that doesn’t hurt its case is rather revealing. It explains that, because the four other people who had access to Merlin did not share all of a series of traits ascribed to Sterling by the government, they “did not face the same sort of scrutiny” as Sterling. [..]
This reveals what should be a weakness in the government’s case. Because (it claims) it has no communications records showing these others speaking with Risen, they must not have, as if a journalist who had covered the CIA for years could not manage a secret conversation with a source. Because (it claims) the others were not both case officers at a meeting in San Francisco who had had a falling out with the CIA, they were not “suspected of having disclosed classified information to Risen.
The Obama administration is negotiating a huge trade deal. The President promises CEOs he will go against his own party to push its passage. To get this done the corporations are pushing Congress to pass something called Fast Track – a process that essentially pre-approves trade agreements before Congress even reads the agreements for the first time.
President Obama visited the quarterly meeting of the Business Roundtable Wednesday and told the business leaders he will push Congress to pass the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The path to passage for TPP is Congress approving the Fast Track process ahead of time, and the President is working to get Fast Track approved over Democratic objections.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Unseen Heart of the Violence: Eric Garner at the Terminal Point
Death, like life, occurs within an interconnected web of forces. Eric Garner died at a specific place and time, but he was drawn there by those larger unseen forces. So was the officer who took his life.
One of them never left.
The neighborhood where Eric Garner died was near the terminal point for the Staten Island Ferry, which leaves lower Manhattan from a newly-built building on Whitehall Street.
The Whitehall building is a few minutes’ walk from Wall Street, and it shows. Commuters leaving at the end of a downtown workday enter a gleaming and futuristic edifice of steel and glass, a 21st landmark which evokes the preceding century’s enduring faith in the future. [..]
The terminal station on Staten Island is considerably more modest. A small building stands alone against the dock, wedged between a large parking lot and inland waters which are often covered with small whitecaps. The address is 1 Bay Street. The spot where Eric Garner died is just a few minutes’ walk from the ferry terminus, at 202 Bay Street.
Pilgrims would feel less welcome there.
Jim Hightower: Operation Endless War: How Long Must US Troops Stay in Afghanistan?
Only a few months ago, President Barack Obama announced the good news that our combat role in Afghanistan – the longest war in U.S. history – would finally end by New Year’s Day.
Put away that champagne.
A flock of screeching war hawks brought heavy political pressure on Obama to reverse himself. So our troops will stay in that war-ravaged, corrupt, bankrupted, ethnically divided country for at least another year or two.
Amazingly, the hawks argued that Obama shouldn’t “rush” the timeline for training Afghan security forces to defend their own country.
Rush? Hello: IT’S BEEN 13 YEARS!
“Operation Enduring Freedom,” as the government originally dubbed this mess of a military mission, should be renamed “Operation Endless War.”
Glen Sherer: Our Rivers in Trouble
Granville Beach was a secluded swimming hole on a snaky bend of the White River, the ideal place to meet Vermont neighbors on a hot summer day before 2011’s Hurricane Irene. Now, the sandy shore, deep waters overhung with box elders, streamside wildflowers, and the lively buzz of riparian birds and dragonflies are gone. [..]
America’s rivers are changing, and not for the good. Their flows are being altered by global warming’s wildly erratic precipitation shifts: torrential rains, floods and drought.
As climate models predicted decades ago, places that once got lots of rain, now often get more. Since the 1950’s, Northeastern downpours have grown 74 percent heavier. They’re 45 percent heavier in the Midwest, 26 percent heavier in the Southeast, and 21 percent on the Great Plains. Likewise, places that got less rain in past, now see intensifying drought. [..]
This isn’t only a U.S. problem. In 1990 and again in 2012, the primitive Kogi tribe of Colombia, South America broke a centuries-long silence with modern humanity to serve us a warning. Keen observers of nature’s interconnectedness, the Kogi warned that global warming is destroying the earth’s rivers, the web of life, and the Great Earth Mother.
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