The verdict for Manning was predetermined, and the show trial in a kangaroo court – a post-modern American remix of China in the 1960s during the Cultural Revolution – just signed, sealed and delivered it.
The President of the United States (POTUS) had already said he was guilty. US corporate media had been screaming for three years he was guilty. Now the US government – who criminalized Manning with “evil intent” - has shown there will be hell to pay for anyone who dares to reveal American war crimes, which are, by definition, unpunishable.
As if there was a need of additional evidence of the “bright” future awaiting Edward Snowden – right on top of US Attorney General Eric Holder’s pathetic letter promising Snowden would not be tortured if extradited to the US.
All this as the Angel of History once more threw a bolt of
lightning irony; Bradley Manning was pronounced guilty on no less
than 19 counts by a Pentagon judge just next door to Spy Central,
the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.
You’re in bed with al-Qaeda
Manning is an Oklahoman – just like music legend J.J. Cale, who
died a few days ago. It was his decision to have his case heard
not by a panel of military jurors – a close match to the Spanish
Inquisition – but by a sole presiding military judge, Col. Denise
Lind.
This was not exactly a sound move – as Lind was duly offered a
carrot to go with the stick, in the form of a promotion to the US Army Court of Appeals
after the show trial.
Unsurprisingly, Pentagon prosecutors defined Manning as a “traitor”, a
hacker and an anarchist (yes, hackers and anarchists are worse
criminals than al-Qaeda jihadists; after all, they are “our”
allies in Syria).
The show trial had a Kafkaesque imprint all the way through. The
Pentagon hacks at first refused to release court documents. Lind
perfected a torture practice of reading for hours from abstruse
rulings. Only under threat of a lawsuit from the media in a
civilian court, the Pentagon reluctantly started releasing the
odd document – obviously redacted to oblivion.
The only accusation that would apply to Manning is unauthorized
disclosure of classified material. Everything else is a farce.
Manning’s defense argued he was a legitimate whistleblower; he
never expected the leaked information to aid the enemy. Yet Lind
denied a request by Manning’s attorneys to throw out the charge.
She said he learned as a low-level intelligence analyst that the
public release of secret information would risk US national
security. The US government was adamant that Manning knew he was
helping al-Qaeda when he released more than 700,000 documents to
WikiLeaks.
Lind even altered the charges when the trial was over
to suit the US government. US corporate media was too busy to
notice it, revelling in the New York mayoral race scandal.
The fact that Manning was found not guilty of aiding the enemy
still leaves him guilty on no less than 19 counts, including
“wantonly cause to be published on the internet intelligence
belonging to the US government” - enough to possibly guarantee
him decades of (military) jail time well into the 22nd century.
After sentencing, it will be up to Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan -
the new commander for the Military District of Washington. He
will review the case - and in theory has the power to reduce
Manning’s overall sentence. Holding one’s breath is not
recommended.
The enemy is you
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, correctly, said on Friday that
if Manning was convicted of aiding the enemy that would be “the
end of national security journalism in the United States.”
Still, the US government and the Pentagon will keep taking no
prisoners in their campaign to criminalize investigative
journalism from the inside (that’s what Manning and Snowden did)
and on the outside (as in WikiLeaks and the work of Glenn
Greenwald).
The hellish circular logic of the US government rules that to
publish information on the internet means spying. So if the enemy
goes on the internet, you are enabling the enemy. Manning being
found not guilty of aiding the enemy but mostly guilty of
everything else still delivers the message – translated in
decades in a military prison.
The verdict also does not change the fact that anything is a
“deep” military or national security “secret” if the
industrial-military-surveillance complex says so. It totally fits
the logic of the Pentagon’s endless war – which in fact is the
same ol’ Global War on Terror (GWOT) of 2001-2002, codified in
the Pentagon’s 2002 Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine (of which
the NSA especially covers the cyberspace sphere), all brilliantly
renamed by Tom Engelhardt as the Global War on You (GWOY).
It’s Paranoia Paradise; an infinite war with enemies lurking
everywhere. The Bush-Obama continuum is the real star of this
show; under the new war on terror that is not a war on terror –
just as the military coup in Egypt is not a military coup – the
Obama administration has already prosecuted more whistleblowers
than all other US administrations combined.
Meanwhile, even Arctic polar bears know Donald Rumsfeld
institutionalized torture in Iraq; the Pentagon killed an untold
number of civilians in its self-defined “arc of instability”; the
Pentagon never admits collateral damage (not to mention
collateral murder); and the absolute majority of the Guantanamo
prisoners are absolutely innocent.
Even if the US government and the Pentagon threw Manning into a
variant of Edgar Allan Poe’s Pit and the Pendulum, they would
never be able to hide their wasteland of war crimes. Assange is
confined to an embassy, Snowden to an airport and Manning to a
jail cell. But make no mistake; it’s the Masters of the Universe
who are afraid, very much afraid. Afraid of anyone with a
conscience; afraid of you; afraid of the whole wide world.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.