Monday, January 17, 2011

Dear Mr. President,

In the January 17 issue of The New Yorker, there’s an article about Sri Lanka s brutal victory over the Tamil insurgents. I admit I didn’t read the whole thing, but this caught my eye: “In the months following [the defeat of the Tamil insurgents], lawyers in the U.S. Justice Department began exploring the possibility of war-crimes prosecution of Gotabaya Rajapaksa – who lived in the United States for a time and acquired citizenship – as well as the former Army commander Sarath Fonseka, a green-card holder.” The first thing that flashed through my mind was, How come the Justice Department is investigating war crimes in Sri Lanka but not the United States? Why aren’t they investigating Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Yoo, and all the other war criminals and thugs who lied to the American public, invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, condoned torture, trampled international law and human rights, and made a mockery of the Constitution? These people are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths and the misery and displacement of hundreds of thousands more. They all left the scene of the crime, so to speak, without once being called to account. “Off the table,” you said, when it was suggested. Where’s the Justice here, Mr. President? Is it only the losers and the weak who are called to account? Hitler’s Nazis, the Serbs, Liberians, Rwandans, the Congolese? Only those who don’t happen to fall under our protection? Well, actually that’s just a rhetorical question. We all know the answer to that one. We investigate war crimes in Sri Lanka, condemn the imprisonment of dissenters in Russia, Iran and Belarus, but ignore the war criminals of the Bush administration and imprison our own patriotic dissenter, a young man of conscience, Pfc. Bradley Manning. Without a trial or even a pretrial hearing, Mr. Manning has been in solitary confinement in a Marine brig for more than seven months. What hypocrisy. What injustice.

Free Bradley Manning!