Friday, March 04, 2011

Dear Mr. President,

For ten months Pfc. Bradley Manning has been in a Marine brig under unusually severe restrictions, essentially isolation, without even a pretrial hearing, and then on Wednesday the Army announced 22 additional charges against him, including “aiding the enemy.” My immediate question was, Who the heck is the enemy here? Is it We the People? Nothing I’ve seen even comes close to aiding al Qaeda or the Taliban. And my next question was, Why is an Army private being held in a Marine brig rather than an Army stockade? Because Marine brigs are notorious for being harder? And whatever happened to a “speedy and fair” trial, anyway? Ten months for “evaluation?” I don’t believe it. What Private Manning did does not warrant this treatment. Unlike your killers in the military, he killed no one, was responsible for no deaths (look in the mirror and think about that, Mr. President) and acted out of moral conviction. Admittedly, what he did was against the letter of the law but not the spirit. When Private Manning saw atrocities and cover-ups by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than just do his job and follow orders, he listened to his conscience and exposed the truth and that upset a lot of people, very powerful people, and now he is being punished for it in the harshest manner possible. Truth, Mr. President, is still the archenemy of repressive governments and dictators, but essential to democracy. During the Nuremburg trials, “just following orders” was not a valid defense and it still isn’t. What is pretty obvious is that your folks at the Injustice Department and the Pentagon are resorting to torture of Private Manning in order to break him down so he’ll implicate Julian Assange and WikiLeaks with the end goal of having something to charge Mr. Assange with and shut down WikiLeaks. This is not only an assault on democracy but a morally repugnant and excessive use of the State’s power. Suppression of information has always gone on, but the pace of suppression in your administration seems to be quickening and that is a very disturbing sign. Suppression of information is what happens under despots: Hussein, Mubarak, Qaddafi and their ilk. Without truth and transparency democracy withers and dies. We the People, the “little people,” those who are neither rich nor powerful, are always the ones who get trampled but everyone, even the rich and the powerful loses in the process. The erosion of liberties and justice affects us all.