Vice President Dick Cheney and former attorney General Alberto Gonzales were indicted on Tuesday by a grand jury in South Texas. The indictment cited “organized criminal activity” surrounding alleged abuse of inmates in private prisons and a “money trail” of Cheney’s ownership in prison-related enterprises. Cheney has an ownership stake in the Vanguard Group, which owns an interest in private prisons in south Texas. The indictment states that Cheney is “profiteering from depriving human beings of their liberty,” according to Reuters.
For his part, Gonzales allegedly chose to “stop the investigations as to the wrong doings” into assaults in county prisons.
I hope this is the first of many indictments for the crimes committed by the Bush administration over the last eight years. We lost our respect for the rule of law at the hands of Bill Clinton. We lost the reigns outright under Bush and Cheney. If Obama doesn’t make an example of Bush, Cheney and their cohorts, there is very little hope that the notion of justice will ever reign again over our amber waves of grain. Unfortunately, I think Obama and his team just aren’t going to be the new sheriff we need. It seems the best we can hope for is that they stay out of the way of justice.
