Wednesday, August 21, 2013

The Savage Wars of Peace

Count me appalled by the light sentence given to Private Manning: hyperlink. The man is lucky not to have been hanged as a traitor, so a thirty-five-year sentence is exceedingly & excessively light, especially given the very highly likely scenario of parole long before he's served his full sentence. By disclosing massive troves of classified information to the anarchist website Wikileaks, Private Manning helped to cause the deaths of both American soldiers & foreign nationals who had aided our soldiers as informants & translators. There is blood on Private Manning's hands, & a hypothetical maximum of thirty-five years is an awfully paltry sentence for costing multiple lives.

Additionally, his actions were no less than an assault on popular sovereignty: The armed forces are authorized to classify whatever data they deem necessary by act of the Congress & directive of the president. The Congress & the president are in turn elected by the citizenry. In disobeying orders & violating the oath he'd sworn, Private Manning substituted his own judgment for that of the body politic; he elevated his own judgment above that of the sovereign citizens of the United States. Bradley Manning decided that he alone was capable of deciding what was in the best interests of the Americans, thus putting the lie to his self-serving assertions that everything he did he did "out of love for our country." (If you think me hyperbolic, dear reader, I beg you to refute this argument.)

Liberty & Union: Obamboozled
I will be surprised, pleasantly so, if President Obama does not either pardon Private Manning or, more likely, commute the remainder of Manning's sentence in January 2017, in the last days of Mr. Obama's administration. Please, please, please let me be pleasantly surprised.

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