Free speech suppressed in the land of the free
Their actions show they don't want free speech. Therefore "the land of the free" is another lie. The actions of the people in power prove their words are a lie, because their actions & words can't both be true and their actions cannot lie, so their words must be the lie. Another sickening example of how our masters lie to us all. (But then Wikileaks keeps showing us our leaders lie). The sad truth is none of us in any country are really free from our masters influence and control.
@AC, ”Standards of Evidence” … "a lot of people that should really walk the plank will now always get away as they can claim that the evidence or jury or both are tainted."
Sorry that would never have worked. Life is just not like that. The people in power were always going to lie their way out. In a court of law, yes tainted evidence is inadmissible in court. But try getting the people in power into court, you wouldn't be able to. The best you could ever hope to do is get a few low ranking scape goats into court and the real power brokers in power over us wouldn't fall. Plus even by some massive stroke of luck you could throw out the entire government on some Watergate level event, you still wouldn't round up the majority of power brokers responsible and they would simply go off into the business world and earn millions in business, so hardly much punishment there. Plus we have multiple governments in each country playing these power games, so you can't take down all governments. Ultimately they are the people in power and that power allows them to resist attempts to effectively undermine their power long enough to bring them down enough to even try to punish them. They have the power to rule over us and they won't give up their power without a massive drawn out fight and they have the power to win that fight.
Sadly I wish I could agree with your idealistic view, but unfortunately your approach fails simply due to your idealistic view of the law and morality, because you are still living under the lies they want you to believe. The true nature of the law is a lie. Its a set of rules to define how a society must live but its also a set of rules that maintain their power and that is the past that is hidden by their lies. The world we live in is shaped by the wishes of the people in power. I have lived for most of my life under that same idealistic view and I can see now many people make the same mistakes as I did. We are all being lied to endlessly. :(
Thankfully wikileaks is helping to show us all that the people in power have very little morality because whatever they say, their lying underhanded ways really show they are only interested in themselves and the law is ultimately what they say is the law and what generations of people just like them have said is the law. Generations of self interested Narcissistic two faced Machiavellian people biasing law in their favour and they define the society we live in. They are the law. (They are always thinking about what the law changes (that they bring in) really means to them and what it means to their expanding governmental departments (that they run) with more influence and bigger budgets (so more money for them) and so their power keeps increasing).
A very good example of how they bias the law in their favour is the whole history how they have punished people trying to gain access to *their* secrets. Its the same story for centuries. We have very serious state punishments for anyone trying to leak secrets, (even if these secrets could show them up for what they have done as Wikileaks has now shown). Therefore most of the time, we have no access to the truth to see what they are really doing, so we just hear what lies they want us to hear. (The MP expenses claims showed this perfectly. It took over 5 years of so called “freedom of information requests” (another lie, as its no real freedom of information) and the end result, nothing, the government blocked every attempt to gain access to the information. In the end, the only way was for some frankly brave person to actually steal the evidence from them! … same with Wikileaks, the only way we see what is really going on).
The people in power have power over us, its as simple as that. We put them into power even though they keep on ending up showing they lie endlessly to us, but then we really have no choice, just an illusion of choice. Even if we don't put them into power we ultimately have no choice because every party at that level of power has these same kind of Narcissistic Machiavellian people in that party. That is the nature of power. They are drawn to power. Its a loose loose loose choice for voters. There is no real winning move.
The only hope we have is to police the people in power far more closely, because by getting to see what they are really doing, we can at least have a hope of stopping their more extreme actions and that is where technology can help us to watch and record them like never before. We very badly need sites like Wikileaks because the people over us keep showing they are such two faced lairs. But then Niccolò Machiavelli tried to tell us all that nearly 500 years ago!. But then many people just like us for generations have suspected the people in power are lairs, but its at least helpful to have it so conclusively proved, because now we can show up anyone who fails to see the people in power are such lairs, (thanks to Wikileaks and thanks to the Internet) so now we can focus on being more unified in standing against the arrogant self interested two faced lairs we have to deal with over us!