[liberationtech] Bradley Manning's sentence: 35 years for exposing us to the truth

[LilBambi]

tragic.

On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 11:32 AM, Shelley <shelley at misanthropia.info> wrote:
> Outrageous.
>
> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/21/bradley-manning-sentence-birgitta-jonsdottir
>
> Bradley Manning's sentence: 35 years for exposing us to the truth
> This was never a fair trial – Obama declared Manning's guilt in advance. But
> Manning's punishment is an affront to democracy
>
> Birgitta Jónsdóttir
> theguardian.com, Wednesday 21 August 2013 10.29 EDT
> Jump to comments (…)
>
> Link to video: Bradley Manning: 35 years in jail for an outsider who had
> trouble fitting in – video
>
> As of today, Wednesday 21 August 2013, Bradley Manning has served 1,182 days
> in prison. He should be released with a sentence of time served. Instead,
> the judge in his court martial at Fort Meade, Maryland has handed down a
> sentence of 35 years.
>
> Of course, a humane, reasonable sentence of time served was never going to
> happen. This trial has, since day one, been held in a kangaroo court. That
> is not angry rhetoric; the reason I am forced to frame it in that way is
> because President Obama made the following statements on record, before the
> trial even started:
>
> President Obama: We're a nation of laws. We don't individually make our own
> decisions about how the laws operate … He broke the law.
>
> Logan Price: Well, you can make the law harder to break, but what he did was
> tell us the truth.
>
> President Obama: Well, what he did was he dumped …
>
> Logan Price: But Nixon tried to prosecute Daniel Ellsberg for the same thing
> and he is a … [hero]
>
> President Obama: No, it isn't the same thing … What Ellsberg released wasn't
> classified in the same way.
>
> When the president says that the Ellsberg's material was classified in a
> different way, he seems to be unaware that there was a higher classification
> on the documents Ellsberg leaked.
>
> A fair trial, then, has never been part of the picture. Despite being a
> professor in constitutional law, the president as commander-in-chief of the
> US military – and Manning has been tried in a court martial – declared
> Manning's guilt pre-emptively. Here is what the Pentagon Papers leaker
> Daniel Ellsberg had to say about this, in an interview with Amy Goodman at
> DemocracyNow! in 2011:
>
> Well, nearly everything the president has said represents a confusion about
> the state of the law and his own responsibilities. Everyone is focused, I
> think, on the fact that his commander-in-chief has virtually given a
> directed verdict to his subsequent jurors, who will all be his subordinates
> in deciding the guilt in the trial of Bradley Manning. He's told them
> already that their commander, on whom their whole career depends, regards
> him [Manning] as guilty and that they can disagree with that only at their
> peril. In career terms, it's clearly enough grounds for a dismissal of the
> charges, just as my trial was dismissed eventually for governmental
> misconduct.
>
> But what people haven't really focused on, I think, is another problematic
> aspect of what he said. He not only was identifying Bradley Manning as the
> source of the crime, but he was assuming, without any question, that a crime
> has been committed.
>
> This alone should have been cause for the judge in the case to rethink
> prosecutors' demand for 60 years in prison. Manning himself has shown
> throughout the trial both that he is a humanitarian and that he is willing
> to serve time for his actions. We have to look at his acts in light of his
> moral compass, not any political agenda.
> Manning intentions were never to hurt anyone; in fact, his motivation – as
> was the case for Ellsberg – was to inform the American public about what
> their government was doing in their name. A defense forensic psychiatrist
> testified to Manning's motives:
>
> Well, Pfc Manning was under the impression that his leaked information was
> going to really change how the world views the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
> and future wars, actually. This was an attempt to crowdsource an analysis of
> the war, and it was his opinion that if … through crowdsourcing, enough
> analysis was done on these documents, which he felt to be very important,
> that it would lead to a greater good … that society as a whole would come to
> the conclusion that the war wasn't worth it … that really no wars are worth
> it.
>
> I admit that I share the same hopes that drove Manning to share with the
> rest of the world the crimes of war he witnessed. I am deeply disappointed
> that no one has been held accountable for the criminality exposed in the
> documents for which Manning is standing trial – except him. It shows so
> clearly that our justice systems are not working as intended to protect the
> general public and to hold accountable those responsible for unspeakable
> crimes.
>
> I want to thank Bradley Manning for the service he has done for humanity
> with his courage and compassionate action to inform us, so that we have the
> means to transform and change our societies for the better. I want to thank
> him for shining light into the shadows. It is up to each and everyone of us
> to use the information he provided for the greater good. I want to thank him
> for making our world a little better. This is why I nominated him for the
> Nobel Peace Prize, for there are very few individuals who have ever brought
> about the kind of social change Manning has put in motion.
>
> The wave of demands for greater transparency, more accountability, and
> democratic reform originate with Manning's lonely act in the barracks in
> Iraq. He has given others – such as Edward Snowden – the courage to do the
> right thing for the rest of us. The heavy hand dealt Bradley Manning today
> is a massive blow against everything many of us hold sacred – at a time when
> we have been shown how fragile and weak our democracies are by the
> revelations of, first, Manning, and now, Snowden.
>
> There is no such thing as privacy anymore; nor is there such a thing as
> accountability among our public servants. Our governments do not function
> for the benefit of the 99%. If Manning had received a fair sentence that was
> in proportion to his supposed crime – which was to expose us to the truth –
> then there would have been hope.
>
> Instead, we are seeing the state acting like a wounded tiger, cornered and
> lashing out in rage – attacking the person who speaks the truth in order to
> frighten the rest of us into silence. But to that, I have only one answer:
> it won't work.
>
>
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