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

[Tom O]

To be honest, this was probably the best he could have hoped for.

He was facing 90. He got 35 with parole after 12.

It's shit, but not as shit as the other options.

If Snowden gets captured, you can bet he will be getting much much worse.

On Thursday, August 22, 2013, LilBambi wrote:

> 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,> --
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