In the Matter of Bradley Manning [View all]

[pinboy3niner]

By Charles Pierce, Esquire
09 January 13

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We do not have to be children here. Bradley Manning could have been confined in conventional imprisonment and brought to a simple trial. The only reason to drag this case out, and to engage in the conduct that Colonel Lind described, was to coerce him into implicating other people. Nothing else makes any possible sense. We are not required to disengage our brains in cases like this. We are repeatedly encouraged to do so, however.

We have lost control of our criminal justice system in cases like this. Due process has become so malleable as to lose its internal logic. Between the seemingly endless echoes of the 9/11 attacks through the law, and the improvisational gymnastics the government has undertaken to do what it wants to do anyway, the country's most fundamental principles have become lost. And yet, we keep trying to gussy up our authoritarian impulses in the robes of the law, to make marble tributes to our undying virtues out of our spontaneous terror that the rule of law is the source of our most dangerous weakness. This is not sustainable. We must be one or the other.

Bradley Manning is only one person caught in this dim, twilight democracy. Entire legal institutions are beginning to fade into it as well. The invaluable Charlie Savage of The New York Times explored the darkening terrain whereon government lawyers are beginning to discover that the illegitimacy of the prison at Guantanamo Bay may have made it impossible to conduct legitimate trials of some of the last people still held there.

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http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/15474-in-the-matter-of-bradley-manning