Counterpunch: The Rule of Law Must Finally Evolve Into the Rule of Justice

Photo credit: James Burke

BY ALFRED DE ZAYAS JANUARY 14, 2022

Many politicians, academics, media pundits are wont of invoking the “rule of law”, a “rules-based international order”, “values diplomacy” etc. But what do all these benevolent-sounding slogans actually mean in practice? Who makes the rules, who interprets them, who enforces them? What transparency and accountability accompany these noble pledges?

Counterpunch: The Rule of Law Must Finally Evolve Into the Rule of Justice

Resolution for 2022: Dare to Build Your Own Opinions and Then Defend Them!

BY: ALFRED DE ZAYAS

Anyone who has followed the political culture in the US, Canada, UK, EU over the past twenty years must have realized that a war on epistemology, on truth, on semantics is going on. We witness the hijacking of concepts like democracy, freedom, peace, patriotism, human rights — and their instrumentalization for domestic and geopolitical purposes. We observe a process of language destruction not unlike what Orwell foresaw in his sadly visionary book 1984. “Newspeak” is not the future, it is now, hic et nunc. We recognize it in the jargon of political correctness, the language and practice of the “cancel culture”.

COUNTERPUNCH: Resolution for 2022: Dare to Build Your Own Opinions and Then Defend Them!

Lava Jato Hacker Walter Delgatti speaks

Lava Jato Hacker Walter Delgatti speaks

Delgatti said that he now has mixed feelings about Greenwald and the Intercept. “I only sent the Intercept 57 gigabytes of the conversations from Lava Jato and after this, Glenn refused to take any more of it. He said, ‘no. What I already have is already going to give us enough material for 1 year of articles. It’s a lot of stuff. I have a year’s worth of articles,’ and he didn’t want any more of it. I had a lot more information and he didn’t want it. Now, he has released very little of what he received. To this day I don’t understand why. I haven’t spoken to him about it. I don’t know if, after the Attorney Generals office filed those charges against him that were later dropped, he might have felt pressured to pause things a little bit. I don’t know because I haven’t had any contact with him, but I see that he has released very little so far. I like the way he has contextualized the things he has published and I thank him for this, but I see that he has really just been publishing these leaks drop by drop and he hasn’t shared everything he’s received. I don’t know the motive for this. The fact is I sent him so much and he hasn’t ended up sharing it. The truth is, I feel a little disappointed and don’t understand why he did this.”

The maximum prison sentence in Brazil for hacking into a smartphone is 1 year, but through a loophole in the law, the Attorney General’s Office is threatening Delgatti with 300 consecutive prison sentences of one year each. When asked how he feels about it, he says that if he could do everything over again he would. “Even if I have to spend the rest of my life behind bars, it will be worth it to me because I know I have contributed something positive for democracy in this country. I believe strongly in this, this is why I didn’t charge the Intercept for the information.”

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has turned over 30 times more information than what was received by the Intercept – 20% of the total volume of leaks – to Lula’s defense team, and more and more evidence beneficial to the defense is coming out daily, much involving illegal collaboration with US Government officials beyond the terms of the partnership agreement. This has already resulted in a motion to drop charges due to violation of Brazil’s sovereignty laws. A recent leak revealed by the defense team shows Lava Jato chief Delton Dallagnol, on the day of Lula’s imprisonment, referring to it as a gift from the CIA. Now that Intercept has lost its monopoly over the Lava Jato leaks, time will tell whether it deliberately sat on evidence beneficial to the defense team of a former President during his unjust political imprisonment in what was recently referred to in a New York Times op ed piece as, the biggest legal scandal in Brazilian history.

Why didn’t he release all of the information and how did the Supreme Court find out who his source was?!