Friday, January 14, 2011

Dear Mr. President,

It feels like I just keep repeating myself day after day, the same old stuff, the daily outrage having to do with the wars or government secrecy or the injustice that seems endemic in America these days. But it feels like out here on the hustings, us lefties who voted for you are twisting in the wind, abandoned and betrayed by a slick-talker who promised to bring Hope Change and Transformation and didn’t. I get the feeling no one’s listening so I keep saying the same thing over and over. Unanswered letters, that’s what these are. A month and a half, almost every day, and not a peep out of anyone back there in the political bubble, isolated from the rest of us, the common folk, the great unwashed, the little people. So here goes another one about the incarceration of Pfc. Bradley Manning. What you’re doing to him is unconscionable. It’s pretty obvious he’s the easiest path to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, and you’re trying to break him so he’ll implicate Mr. Assange in stealing all that secret stuff that doesn’t make the government or the military look good. Even the UN has started an inquiry into the torture and abuse of Bradley Manning. This young man is a hero of democracy, a true patriot, but like all true patriots, he’s an enemy of the power elite who want nothing more than to lock him up and shut him up. So there he sits in a Marine brig under the harshest and strictest regime for military prisoners, labeled a danger to the security of the U.S. of A. In reality, the politicians, the generals and the power elite are the real dangers to democracy and America. Their secrets, lies and backroom deals, their visions of empire, their slaughter of innocents, their trampling of the Constitution, their looting of the treasury. Why isn’t Bush and Company locked up? They’re the real criminals, the promoters of war and torture, of death and destruction. Where’s the justice here? Why is it none of the bankers and Wall Street tycoons and power brokers who ripped off the public and caused financial chaos around the world are held accountable? Or the generals who cover up atrocities, who skew information, who go along with the program? Why is it Cheney and Libby can out a CIA agent with impunity while a Pfc. who exposes the cover-ups and backroom deals gets tossed in the brig for more than seven months, no trial, no hearing, no justice. Double standard, Mr. President. I can see why your Dems got kicked out. I’m pissed off too.

Free Bradley Manning!