[Newspoetry] Your taxes used to subsidize assassination?

[Donald L Emerick]

I forgot some co-conspirators.

A:  Senator Fitzgerald:
for an act of publicizing
a solicitation, by another,
of felonious criminal acts
makes him indictable and convictable
as an accessory-before-the-fact.

B:  The news media:
for the same acts of criminal publication.
B1.  NewsMedia may have some defense
of press, founded in the First Amendment --
that reporting upon inchoate crime
does not constitute any participation
in the underlying criminal conduct.
B2.  But, against this defense,
the Courts have declared
their curious pronouncements
that are quite to the contrary.

C:  We, the people:
if we know about it,
and do nothing sufficient to stop it
become silent partners in a crime.
C1: Free speech,
like free publication,
alleges no defense strong enough
against acts of criminal conspiracy.
C2:  What acts are sufficient
to remove oneself from
the engulfing broad reach of
abdicational participation
in a criminal conspiracy?
C2a: Call your local police office
and report the facts of the crime.
C3:  What acts are insufficient?
C3a: Just speaking to friends,
as if in stage whispers,
to an unseen audience,
who are known to be asleep,
who are known not to care
enough to act, at all, or else
they, too, would be on stage.

D:  But, I am innocent
because I am speaking out,
here and now, on the Web,
where I can be sure
the police are listening,
because I also have the promise
of putative Government, itself,
that it will monitor all scenes,
identify every crime-to-be
in the offing as merest offering,
before it could ever come to be,
in the interests of Homeland Security.
D1.  Too bad King George I
didn't think of such a neat label
for his war-time campaigns of violating
inalienable rights as civil liberties.
D1a:  There must have been no spin
nor doctors of words back then.
D2.  My defense is a good one:
the prosecution is estopped
from asserting that I failed
to inform them, as if in a self-confession. --
D2a: See Derrida/Caputo on CircumFession,
commenting on Augustine's Confession.
D2b:  But also, see, Compulsory Confession
is no bar to conviction as it speaks of same,
even if in most suspect, largely false voices.

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick