The Prince of Denmark defence

In 2003, Allan Kessing, a Customs official at Sydney’s privatised airport, reported that some Customs staff were drug-runners and thieves. His report was suppressed.  In 2005, someone gave Kessing’s report to a newspaper. Prime Minister John Howard’s Australian government spent $200 million to (unsuccessfully) improve security at the airport, and charged Kessing with whistleblowing.  At his trial in 2007, the judge told jurors not to take the public interest into account. They were initially split, but eventually found Kessing guilty. The judge gave him nine months suspended. In March 2013, it was revealed that Customs at the airport was still infiltrated with organised criminals. Kessing remained a convicted criminal.

Where are Obama and the Justice Department?

In the US, there is a Prince of Denmark defence for almost any crime, including murder. A few recent examples only:

·       When Barack Obama became President in 2008, he said he wanted to look forward, not back. The Justice Department did not charge anyone from the previous administration with torture.  

·       Charges were not laid against people on Wall Street partly responsible for a global financial crisis.

·       The department offered no demur when Obama’s agents killed an unarmed man, Osama bin Laden, or to Obama’s claimed right to use drones to kill anyone he deems suitable.

Where are the Honkers and Shankers?

In 1971, President Richard Nixon launched a “war on drugs”. The net effect was to make drug-running more profitable, and to fill US prisons with people found in possession of as little as leaf of marijuana.Drug cartels blatantly laundered money through Mexican branches of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank via boxes constructed to fit the exact dimensions of tellers’ windows. The boxes were daily used to deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars into a single account.  The bank eventually admitted it had laundered billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels. In December 2012, the US Justice Department fined the bank $1.9 billion, a sum about equal to its income for five weeks, but did not charge anyone with a crime.   

Where is The New York Times?

 A US soldier, Bradley Manning, whistle-blew government data because he was ashamed that soldiers in Iraq deliberately killed civilians, and because he wanted “to make the world a better place”. The material was eventually published by The New York Times, presumably also in the public interest. Manning was arrested in May 2010 and charged with assisting the enemy, which carries the death penalty. For nine months, he was tortured via forced nakedness, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and stress positions. Unfortunately for Manning, he does not have a civilian jury, and it would probably be useless to hint to the military court that he could be found not guilty because no one at The New York Times was arrested, charged with assisting the enemy and tortured.     

Where is the Assassination Bureau?

In January 2012, John Kiriakou, a CIA operative, was charged with leaking information about CIA torture, including the name of a covert CIA officer. His crimes, if any, were minuscule by comparison with the CIA’s over 60 years. For example:

In 1951, Allen Dulles initiated a section of the US Central Intelligence Agency which has run drugs, colluded with gangsters, and destroyed foreign governments. Bill Blum, former State Department official and author of Rogue State, says the CIA “has attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders, many successfully”. Kiriakou acted largely in the public interest but jurors are eliminated from about 90% of US criminal cases by what is effectively blackmail. Prosecutors offer suspects a no-risk plea bargain: accept some prison time or possibly go down for several years or life. In January 2013, Kiriakou accepted 2 ½ years.