U.S. President Barack Obama has blocked accountability, everywhere he can.
(1) Obama did it for the top officials who had caused illegal tortures to be used by the Government.
(2) Obama did it also for the top officials who had caused mega-banks to crash in 2008 (whose crimes have, in turn, led to taxpayer-bailouts of the banks that they ran and often still run, all courtesy of Bush-Obama). In order to keep their Ponzi-economy going, his Administration (including his Federal Reserve) is now letting Wall Street's federally-backstopped mega-banks "Enron"-ize the commodities markets: oil, gas, coal, metals, even uranium, and (yet again) electricity.
(3) Obama did it also for the top officials (led by G.W. Bush himself) who had caused a certain country, which posed no threat to us, to be invaded by us in 2003, and subsequently to produce over $3 trillion in economic losses for the U.S., plus thousands of pointless deaths, and millions of unnecessary refugees, and the resulting development of today's fanatical ISIS: this country that was raped by the U.S. is, of course, Iraq -- and an unprovoked and totally propaganda-based invasion of any country is an international war crime, but the U.S. did such a thing, and no one has been punished for having done it, nor even (such as Condoleezza Rice) for having participated in it.
Obama blocked accountability, even for that enormous crime, which was a crime against not only Iraq, but also against America itself, especially against the veterans, who suffer greatly, even today, from the hell Bush and his co-conspirators wrought there.
The masterminds, the planners, and the liars, for that invasion, have all been unprosecuted by Obama, just as they were unprosecuted by their originator and mega-criminal, President George W. Bush.
By contrast, to compare against Obama's record of non-prosecutions against these elite mega-criminals -- these people who were never held accountable for anything, but who produced immense damages to Americans and to people around the world -- Obama is simply an ordinary President in his record of charging and prosecuting crimes by the far-more-numerous categories of non-elite crooks, these being the violators who had failed their responsibilities, as opposed to those elite criminals, whom Obama prohibited from being prosecuted for having violated their accountabilities. (As examples of Obama's enforcing responsibilities, consider that, on 31 December 2008, 21 days before Obama became President, the total population in U.S. federal prisons was 201,280. By the time of 31 December 2012, after four years with him as President, it was 217,815, or 8.2% larger. But, then, both federal and state prison populations started a decline; and, as of 16 October 2014, the federal prison population is 213,901, which still is 6.3% higher than when Obama first entered office. So, when an American has failed his responsibilities under law, Obama has been fairly harsh, he has not left those crimes unprosecuted, and unpunished.)
To investigate and prosecute only crimes upward (violations of responsibilities), and no crimes downward (violations of accountabilities), is profoundly unjust, especially because the many trillions of dollars, and the millions of lives, that are transferred or lost in downward crimes, and especially in the most-elite ones, dwarf the financial and human transfers in upward crimes, the run-of-the-mill crimes. Furthermore, downward crimes exacerbate wealth-inequalities, whereas there is no such general tendency on the part of upward crimes.
Obama talks a storm against widening wealth-inequality, but his actual policies widen it still further, as if he doesn't really believe what he says, or care about it. He made a decision to continue his predecessor's bailout of the mega-banks and their top (inside) investors, rather than of their victims the defrauded home-buyers and outside investors; and the natural result of that choice on his and Bush's part is this widening wealth-gap.
No U.S. President in history (not even Bush) has the extreme record of selective prosecution (against lower-level crooks) and non-prosecution (protecting elite crooks) that Obama does. Obama is the all-time-record pro-aristocratic, anti-public, U.S. President. To use the word "Justice," in relation to his Department of 'Justice,' is to insult and demean that very term, and not merely to miss-call that Department.
Compare Obama's record of enforcing responsibilities (obligations upward, to employers or others who are higher in the power-structure), versus his total protection and non-prosecution of the elite mega-crooks, the individuals who had violated their accountabilities (obligations downward, to employees and to others who are lower in the power-structure, including to customers and to outside investors): Both the top bank executives, and the top Federal executives, who had masterminded and overseen elite mega-crimes -- some of which mega-crimes (especially the financial ones) were extremely profitable for their masterminds -- have all gotten off scot-free, because of Obama's protecting criminal elites from any accountability whatsoever, as will now be documented fully, via the links:
TORTURES
Consider that, when Obama came into office in 2009, there were torrents of elite crimes to be prosecuted, such as illegal waterboarding -- it is banned under both U.S. law and international law. But, as McClatchy Newspapers noted on 16 October 2014, "Obama opposed any further inquiry. ... He also ruled out future prosecutions" for it. (There had been no past prosecutions of these executives, the ones who planned and oversaw it, though there had been prosecutions of some low-level troops, who had violated their responsibilities.) Headlining "Senate's inquiry into CIA torture sidesteps blaming Bush, aides," McClatchy's reporters wrote that, "It's not as if there wasn't evidence that Bush and his top national security lieutenants were directly involved in the program's creation and operation. ... Bush opened the way in February 2002 by denying al Qaida and Taliban detainees the protection of an international ban against torture. ... Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld relentlessly pressured interrogators to subject detainees to" perpetrate waterboarding and other illegal "interrogation" means, which were claimed by the Bush Administration to be necessary for extracting the truth from detainees, but which actually did not extract any truths from them.
Such tortures "extracted" mis-information -- waterboarding caused the detainee "to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear" -- perhaps even such things as that "Saddam Hussein paid us to do it," or anything else to stop the moment's suffocation via waterboarding. Vanity Fair's independent investigation, of the torturing, interviewed:
"numerous counterterrorist officials from agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Their conclusion is unanimous: not only have coercive methods failed to generate significant and actionable intelligence, they have also caused the squandering of resources on a massive scale through false leads, chimerical plots, and unnecessary safety alerts--with Abu Zubaydah's case one of the most glaring examples. Here, they say, far from exposing a deadly plot, all torture did was lead to more torture of his supposed accomplices while also providing some misleading 'information' that boosted the administration's argument for invading Iraq."
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