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.<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n
President Obama: We\u2019re a nation of laws. We don\u2019t individually make our own decisions about how the laws operate \u2026 He broke the law.<\/p>\n
Logan Price: Well, you can make the law harder to break, but what he did was tell us the truth.<\/p>\n
President Obama: Well, what he did was he dumped \u2026<\/p>\n
Logan Price: But Nixon tried to prosecute Daniel Ellsberg for the same thing and he is a \u2026 [hero]<\/p>\n
President Obama: No, it isn\u2019t the same thing \u2026 What Ellsberg released wasn\u2019t classified in the same way.<\/p>\n
When the president says that the Ellsberg\u2019s material was classified in a different way, he seems to be unaware that there was a higher classification on the documents Ellsberg leaked.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 and Manning has been tried in a court martial \u2013 declared Manning\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n