As Eric Holder Relentlessly Drives Towards Execution of Tsarnaev, He Proclaims His Opposition to the Death Penalty

Actions speak louder than words. That’s an old saying. It behooves everyone on earth to keep it in mind whenever manipulative rhetoric spouts from the mouths of Obama regime apparatchiks. (That goes for any U.S. regime in fact.)

Examples of this cynical gang saying the exact opposite of what they’re actually doing are legion. We were fed more of this self-serving guff just a few days ago, served up by Eric Holder, Jr., the rich corporate lawyer who is the top legal repressor in the U.S. as head of the Federal Department of “Justice.” As U.S. Attorney General, he is the chief prosecutor of the nation. Whenever one of the local offices of a Federal prosecutor wishes to seek a death penalty against a defendant, it must be approved by the Attorney General before the trial. The decision to seek the execution of any Federal defendant thus rests squarely in the hands of the Attorney General. So does the responsibility, obviously.

The U.S. government is currently seeking the death penalty against the surviving alleged Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was 19 years old when the bombing was committed in 2013. That decision, as I said, was made by Eric Holder. Only Eric Holder had the power to make that call. [1]

Yet Holder had to gall to spew the following words from his maw a couple of days ago in a speech delivered at the National Press Club [2] in Washington, D.C. (in other words, injected directly into a media vein):

"Now I’ve [sic] speaking personally, not as a member of the administration, so somehow separate yourself here. [Laughter from assembled media hacks.] Um. You know, I-I think there are fundamental questions that we need to ask about the uh, the death penalty. I have not, uh, been shy in saying that I am a person who is opposed, to the uh use of the death penalty..… The Supreme Court’s determination as to whether or not, um, lethal injection is consistent with our, our Constitution is one that, that dah, that ought to occur. From my perspective, I think a moratorium until, the um, Supreme Court made that determination would be appropriate." (Holder emphasized the word “opposed” in his speech. These were his actual spoken words.)

But he’s not too opposed to order it in cases he has ultimate authority over.  And what weird meaning is contained in that phrase he uttered, “somehow separate yourself here.” What  a Freudian slip. It’s like he’s talking to himself. (It doesn’t make sense addressed to the audience.”

Did Holder rehearse this speech in front of a mirror? He should have, because that would have been the appropriate audience for it! 

In fact, to try and make sure Tsarnaev is put to death, Holder authorized seventeen death penalty charges to be lodged against Tsarnaev, out of a total of 30 charges.  And Holder certainly doesn’t have to wait for a Supreme Court decision to deny permission to the prosecutors in his charge to seek death sentences in Federal cases.

Holder’s also the guy who thinks it is perfectly legal and swell for his boss, Obama, to summarily execute Americans and others by drone and cruise missile attacks because “due process isn’t judicial process,” as he lectured a law school audience in 2012. Due process is a bunch of executive branch minions meeting in secret and deciding to kill someone, and then giving the military and/or CIA the green light to kill whomever it is the military or CIA want to kill. Frankly the Bush rationale is preferable. Just call it “war.” Holder thinks an absolute-monarch-style death penalty is fine, but he “opposes the death penalty.” Sure you do, Eric. [3]

Now, obviously this has nothing to do with how one feels about executing Tsarnaev, or whether the Federal government should be seeking to execute teenagers for their crimes. It’s about the blatant phoniness and deceit of Eric Holder. (I wouldn’t even call it hypocrisy. Hypocrisy usually operates unconsciously. Holder knows what he’s doing. He’s a cynic. But he’s a hypocrite too in that he says the opposite of what he does.)

The hanging Judge in the Tsarnaev case, Federal District Court judge George A. O’Toole, Jr., has been furiously pushing the “process” to its inevitable and preordained conclusion, conviction and death for Tsarnaev.

So far, 1373 prospective jurors have filled out questionnaires. Of those, 68% are convinced that Tsarnaev is guilty (so much for “the presumption of innocence” of the defendant, and an “impartial” jury), and a whopping 69%- over two-thirds- had a personal connection to the case.

No problem!  -insist both the judge and the prosecution. (Gee, you don’t suppose they’re on the same side, do you?) The judge has collected 61 potential jurors he considers just fine, with a goal of picking 70, from which 12 jurors and 6 alternates (to replace jurors who drop out or are expelled during the trial) who will be “impartial” will be picked. The defense complained to the Appeals court that O’Toole cuts short their attempts to question the jury pool candidates. O’Toole has show the typical pro-prosecution bias of American judges, especially in political cases. Two weeks before the start of jury selection, the government dumped 2000 pages of documents on the defense, and the judge denied the defense a delay to have time to examine and research their contents. (That’s a standard trick of U.S. prosecutors, complying with the obligation under “discovery” to provide evidence to the defense. That is, if the defense is lucky. Sometimes the prosecution keeps evidence secret entirely- namely exculpatory evidence. Happens every day in both the Federal and state court systems.)

In arguing to the Appeals court panel against a change of venue, one of the prosecutors, William D. Weinreb, solemnly proclaimed with a straight face that jurors would be sure to be unbiased because they have to take an oath swearing that pretrial publicity didn’t influence them! Well okay then! [4]

In addition to developing selective amnesia for everything they’ve been exposed to over the last two years, the jurors will also have to be blind to the post-bombing propaganda slogan, “Boston Strong,” plastered on construction equipment outside the courthouse, which they will be passing every day.

The defense had a whole 20 minutes to argue its case for a change of venue before a three-judge panel of the Federal appeals court for the “First Circuit,” which covers Massachusetts (the state Boston is located in) and nearby states. Previous defense attempts to move the trial, including appealing to the Appeals court, failed. This was the first time they were allowed to present oral arguments to the Appeals court. 

The Chief Judge of the Appeals court, Sandra L. Lynch, airily threw a particularly specious and cynical argument in the faces of Tsarnaev’s defense lawyers. She opined that Tsarnaev wouldn’t suffer irreparable harm if the trial wasn’t moved because after he’s convicted, he can always appeal on the grounds that the trial wasn’t moved! [5]

Right. As if these exalted jurists would vacate Tsarnaev’s conviction on the grounds that his trial shouldn’t have been held in Boston at all when they won’t even grant a change of venue before the trial!

The most amazingly fatuous Alice-in-Wonderland mind-twisting statements emerge from the mouths of U.S. apparatchiks at times.

1] The story is that Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamarlan, a domineering character who apparently held Dzhokhar in his thrall, planted two bombs in backpacks at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon. Three people were killed and over 260 were wounded in the ensuing blasts, including people who lost legs. The Federal, State, and local police in effect declared martial law in Boston and raided various homes in a hunt for the Tsarnaevs. Tamarlan was killed, and the media put out various police-originated stories about how this happened. (Much murkiness about this still. A man who looked like Tamarlan was forced to strip naked and taken into custody, unharmed, and this event was captured on video. Also it was claimed Dzhokhar ran over Tamarlan in a stolen vehicle while fleeing a shootout with the police, killing him. How Dzhokhar could have driven away and escaped the police is hard to fathom. Pictures supposedly of Tamarlan’s corpse show a body with a blackened face and two large oblong holes in the torso. Given the amount of disinformation the various arms of government and media put out about political matters, it becomes extremely tricky to separate fact from fiction at times.)

After the police gave up the hunt for Dzhokhar, a homeowner noticed someone hiding in a small boat he keeps on his property and called the police. They came with a helicopter and armored vehicle and attempted to finish off the now-unarmed Dzhokhar as a lay inside the boat, firing a fusillade into the boat as he lay inside it and wounding him. This was falsely reported as a “shootout.” Of course, the FBI interrogated him in the hospital without a lawyer for Dzhokhar, so they could claim he made self-incriminating statements. (The FBI follows a policy of never recording their interrogations. Gee, I wonder why. The fact that their media-vaunted “crime lab” was exposed committing massive fraud might be a clue. You want to trust what the FBI says, be my guest.)

2] The “National Press Club” is a gang of snob propagandists, based in the capital of the U.S. empire, Washington, D.C., whose main function is to act as courtiers to the political power structure. Insufferably smarmy and ideological to their core, they barred I.F. Stone, a genuine journalist who wrote the truth about the Vietnam War while they were lying and cheerleading for that crime against humanity. (After his death, Stone was libeled by the hard right-wing noise machine in the U.S. as a “Soviet spy.” They waited until he was dead to do that because the dead can’t sue for libel. There was no outrage over this gratuitous character assassination by the “liberal” media.) Holder assembled these media hacks to deliver his cynical propaganda directly to them.

3] Don’t expect anything better from Holder’s designated successor, Loretta Lynch, a ruthless hussy who literally steals the savings of hard-working small businesspeople and others. She likes to boast about the hundreds of millions of dollars she’s swiped  through “civil asset forfeiture.” Just one of many examples was her seizure of almost half a million dollars from the bank account of a perfectly legitimate company called Bi-County Distributors. She only released her talons from the loot after two and a half years the week before her confirmation hearings to be the next Attorney General of the U.S. See “AG Nominee Loretta Lynch Says Civil Asset Forfeiture ‘Protections Are There.’ Not When Her Office Ignores Them,” reason.com, Jan. 29, 2015, “Loretta Lynch’s Worrisome Answer on Civil Asset Forfeiture,” cato.org, 1/30/15 (she ignores the law on stealing people’s assets while sanctimoniously draping her thefts in the colors of law), and  “Law Lets IRS Seize Accounts on Suspicion, No Crime Required,” New York Times,  Oct. 25, 2014, among many other sources. The NY Times smarmily covers Lynch’s ass for her by not so much as mentioning her name in its article, even though it discusses her Bi-County case. But still, give the NYT “credit” for finally reporting a few examples (out of countless thousands) of the rampant abuse of “asset forfeiture” that has been going on in the U.S. for at least 30 years now. Generally, the NYT is the last place news is reported. Being years or decades late is common for them, I have noticed.

For a report on how asset “forfeiture” has enabled U.S. cops to act as bandits, see for example the report “Policing for Profit,” March 2010.

The New Yorker had an article graphically describing bandit police stalking their prey on highways in one town. “Taken,” Aug 12, 2013.

  

4] Weinreb of course works for the notorious Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. attorney for the Boston area, whose minions drove Aaron Swartz to suicide, after which she stoutly defended her and their actions. See “Obama Regime Creates Another Martyr,” Jan. 17, 2013; “Brace Yourselves For Unintended Ironies In Aaron Swartz Affair,” Jan. 19, 2013; and “The Most Dangerous Person in the U.S. Congress,“ Aug. 5, 2014.

5] “Defendant’s Lawyers in Boston Bombing Trial Ask for Change of Venue,” New York Times, Feb. 20, 2015, page A14. Online as “Tsarnaev’s Lawyers in Boston Bombing Trial Ask for Change of Venue,” Feb. 19.