Here’s another of those stories we see far too many of these days:

Blackwater Probe Stifled by Conflicts – Politics on The Huffington Post

RICHARD LARDNER | November 26, 2007 05:57 PM EST | AP
WASHINGTON — The State Department’s acerbic top auditor wasn’t happy when Justice Department officials told one of his aides to leave the room so they could discuss a criminal investigation of Blackwater Worldwide, the contractor protecting U.S. diplomats in Iraq.

The episode reveals the badly strained relationship between Bush administration officials over the probe into whether Blackwater smuggled weapons into Iraq that could have gotten into insurgents’ hands.

As a result of the bureaucratic crosscurrents between State’s top auditor and Justice, the investigation has been bogged down for months.

A key date was July 11, when Howard Krongard, State’s inspector general, sent an e-mail to one of his assistant inspector generals, telling him to “IMMEDIATELY” stop work on the Blackwater investigation. That lead to criticisms by Democrats that Krongard has tried to protect Blackwater and block investigations into contractor-related wrongdoing in Iraq.

For all such things that come to light, how many more stay buried? And of the ones that are uncovered, how many of the responsible parties are ever held accountable? We’ve seen so much of this that most people seem to me to be either stunned or inured.

But here’s the thing: the rash of such things that we’ve been seeing in the very public federal realms isn’t anything new. They happen regularly on local and state levels, drawing little if any attention at all–certainly not the level the federal stuff does (even though there’s way too little attention paid at the federal level too). Most of us don’t really care what the system does to anyone else as long as we’re getting along okay. It’s just somebody else’s tough luck. A state or local bureaucracy stomping on the random citizen now and then isn’t sexy enough for most news outlets to pay attention to, and seeking redress through the courts is nearly always futile. That’s because governmental bodies make laws to protect themselves from the people they are supposed to serve.

Next post: how bureaucrats of different sorts can, and do, violate something as basic as due process with impunity. (This is something every lawyer knows, but we were never taught it in civics class.)

Peace.

Deborah Alicen