Martha Stewart And George Bush: Punishing The Innocent, Excusing the Guilty

Paul Craig Roberts
July 16, 2004, 9:00 am

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Martha Stewart has been sentenced to 5 months in
prison and two years of supervised release for not
telling the truth about a legal stock tip. The only
thing she has been found guilty of is lying about a
noncrime.

Mrs. Stewart was neither

charged with, nor found guilty of, insider trading.

Neither she nor her broker had
inside information that ImClone`s anti-cancer drug was
turned down by federal regulators.

They only knew that ImClone`s
founder was selling stock.

Savvy investors often sell when
executives sell, because they see stock sales by a
company`s management as signs of management`s lack of
confidence in the company`s future. If the company`s
founder didn`t want ImClone`s stock, Martha Stewart
didn`t want it herself. She sold.

Neither Mrs. Stewart nor her broker
knew ImClone`s founder was selling on the basis of
inside information. When news of an investigation came
to light, Mrs. Stewart and her broker were unsure of how
her sale would be

interpreted by prosecutors. The Securities and
Exchange Commission has refused to define

"insider trading" on the grounds that a vague
offense surrounded by uncertainty makes it easier to
convict defendants who are accused.

Faced with the possibility of being
accused of a

vague and undefined crime, Mrs. Stewart and her
broker stated that they had an agreement to sell when an
agreed price was reached. The statement was not made
under oath and if false does not constitute perjury.

Prosecutors claim the statement was
a stratagem to cover up a stock tip, the legality of
which was unclear to Stewart and her broker, and
constituted a false statement that "obstructed"
the investigation.

Thus, even though prosecutors
uncovered no evidence that Mrs. Stewart had committed a
crime, they

indicted her for "obstructing justice" by not
telling them what they say is the truth about the stock
sale—even though what the prosecutors say is the truth
about the sale does not constitute a crime.

No one knows whether Martha Stewart
and her broker told the truth or not, but jurors

naively believed the prosecutors.

No one—not jury, judge, nor
prosecutor—had enough sense or decency to know that it
made no difference one way or the other.

No one can be guilty of covering up
a noncrime.

Meanwhile the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence has released its report, which
states that the information used by President Bush, Vice
President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and
Secretary of State Powell to justify the invasion of
Iraq was incorrect. Everything Powell told the UN and
Bush told the American people was wrong. A war with tens
of thousands of casualties was started, if not on the
basis of massive outright lies, on the basis of massive
orchestrated misinformation.

The deception was so successful
that 45% of Americans purport to still believe that
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and links
to Osama bin Laden.

The senators say the invasion was
unjustified, but no person is to blame—only

"the process." The intelligence information
was not correctly collected, analyzed, processed, or
reported. Thus, everything got fuddled up and our
incompetent government confused myth with reality.

The buck stops nowhere. No one is
to be held accountable for a disastrous blunder that has
destroyed tens of thousands of people and a half century
of US foreign policy, wasted $200 billion dollars, and
made Americans unsafe for decades to come.

If we apply the "process is
guilty" standard to Mrs. Stewart that is applied to
our government leaders, even if she told a lie the fault
lies in the vagueness of the insider trading offense.

Not knowing what the offense is,
people try to defend against being accused of it.

Mrs. Stewart is not guilty. The

process of the law is guilty for not defining the
offense known as insider trading.

Judges and jurors are guilty for allowing
prosecutors to use vague laws and regulations to indict
people.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration
refuses to allow contracts that it handed out to cronies
to be audited, while imprisoning

corporate executives for far less

accounting sins.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration
has ordered

Japan to detain and extradite former world chess
champion

Bobby Fischer for playing in a

1992 chess match in Yugoslavia. By playing a chess
match, the US government claims that Mr. Fischer
violated UN sanctions against Yugoslavia, a country
charged with provoking warfare because it tried to

prevent secession just as

Abe Lincoln did.