Obama and Bradley Manning

Dear Mr. President,

I have to admit that I was more than a little embarrassed to realize that Tuesday’s New York Times article about your Targeted Assassinations Program was not an expose but purposely leaked to burnish your image as a tough warrior, a cyber-Rambo, to help you trounce Romney in November. Talk about a rube! I mean, here’s this top secret program’s details, information so secret that to even acknowledge its existence would jeopardize national security, openly discussed in a splashy three-page article in the Times. And the sources were three dozen current and former advisers, some on the record, talking to reporters in great detail, about how you personally approve every name on the “Kill List” every week, how making the call to kill an American citizen who had not even been charged with a crime—in complete violation of the Constitution—was an “easy one,” how you ordered Mehsud’s assassination even though you knew his wife and family members—non-combatants—would also be killed. They portray you as the philosophical warrior making the moral calculation of who lives and who dies in what you see as a “just” war. But this is not a “just” war, Mr. President, and those are not moral calculations you’re making, those are the decisions of a cold blooded killer and war criminal. The story may have been planted to burnish your image, but I still find it hard to believe because it is so damning and every day I look for news of an investigation and the arrest of these leakers who’ve given top secret information to the press. Meanwhile, Bradley Manning’s been in prison for two years now, nine months of that in solitary confinement at the Marine brig in Quantico, deprived of sleep, exercise and human contact, and, for the last few weeks of his stay there, forced to strip naked every night and stand at attention that way every morning, all this for allegedly leaking state secrets to WikiLeaks. Charged with “aiding and abetting the enemy” he will finally come to trial this summer by a kangaroo military court which will dutifully pronounce him guilty. Meanwhile your operatives remain uninvestigated, uncharged, even hailed as celebrities after leaking the “right” state secrets to the press. You are a hypocrite, a liar and a scofflaw, all the trademarks of a politician. But even more damning, you are a terrorist, a war criminal and a threat to world peace. Bradley Manning should have your Nobel Peace Prize and you should be the one locked up in the brig.