The New Yorker's John Cassidy has a piece reflecting on the Bradley Manning verdict. He makes 3 salient key points. One of them:
"3. Even if President Obama doesn’t pardon Manning, history will.
Well before the sentence came down, supporters of Manning were busy campaigning to get him freed. There were demonstrations in Washington and elsewhere, bumper stickers, and online petitions—one of which Daniel Ellsberg, the former Department of Defense official who leaked the Pentagon Papers, helped to organize. In the wake of the verdict, more protests were planned, including a rally outside the White House on Wednesday night. Amnesty International asked President Obama to release Manning and called on the U.S. government to “turn its attention to investigating violations of human rights and humanitarian law” he helped to uncover.
It seems unlikely in the extreme that these efforts will lead anywhere. Obama has insisted all along that Manning’s case was a matter for the military authorities, and that he wasn’t going to intervene. “We’re a nation of laws,” the President said at a fundraising breakfast, in 2011. “We don’t individually make our own decisions about how the laws operate …. He broke the law.”
In helping to reveal that the U.S. authorities had repeatedly misled the public about the war in Vietnam, Ellsberg also broke the law, of course. So do most whistle-blowers who are employed by the government. But history tends to be kinder to them than the courts, and I doubt that this case will be an exception. In fifty years, people will look on the Manning case as another blot on a dark era for the United States and the values that it claims to hold dear. As for Manning himself, future historians will surely agree with Ellsberg, who, speaking to the A.P. yesterday, described him as “one more casualty of a horrible, wrongful war.”
See also this piece "Manning's Sentence, Miranda's Detention" by Amy Davidson - who closely followed the trial - also in The New Yorker.
"3. Even if President Obama doesn’t pardon Manning, history will.
Well before the sentence came down, supporters of Manning were busy campaigning to get him freed. There were demonstrations in Washington and elsewhere, bumper stickers, and online petitions—one of which Daniel Ellsberg, the former Department of Defense official who leaked the Pentagon Papers, helped to organize. In the wake of the verdict, more protests were planned, including a rally outside the White House on Wednesday night. Amnesty International asked President Obama to release Manning and called on the U.S. government to “turn its attention to investigating violations of human rights and humanitarian law” he helped to uncover.
It seems unlikely in the extreme that these efforts will lead anywhere. Obama has insisted all along that Manning’s case was a matter for the military authorities, and that he wasn’t going to intervene. “We’re a nation of laws,” the President said at a fundraising breakfast, in 2011. “We don’t individually make our own decisions about how the laws operate …. He broke the law.”
In helping to reveal that the U.S. authorities had repeatedly misled the public about the war in Vietnam, Ellsberg also broke the law, of course. So do most whistle-blowers who are employed by the government. But history tends to be kinder to them than the courts, and I doubt that this case will be an exception. In fifty years, people will look on the Manning case as another blot on a dark era for the United States and the values that it claims to hold dear. As for Manning himself, future historians will surely agree with Ellsberg, who, speaking to the A.P. yesterday, described him as “one more casualty of a horrible, wrongful war.”
See also this piece "Manning's Sentence, Miranda's Detention" by Amy Davidson - who closely followed the trial - also in The New Yorker.
Comments