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Chris Hedges: Bradley Manning and the Gangster State
from truthdig:
Bradley Manning and the Gangster State
Posted on Aug 21, 2013
By Chris Hedges
FORT MEADE, Md.The swift and brutal verdict read out by Army Col. Judge Denise Lind in sentencing Pfc. Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison means we have become a nation run by gangsters. It signals the inversion of our moral and legal order, the death of an independent media, and the open and flagrant misuse of the law to prevent any oversight or investigation of official abuses of power, including war crimes. The passivity of most of the nations citizensthe most spied upon, monitored and controlled population in human historyto the judicial lynching of Manning means they will be next. There are no institutional mechanisms left to halt the shredding of our most fundamental civil liberties, including habeas corpus and due process, or to prevent pre-emptive war, the assassination of U.S. citizens by the government and the complete obliteration of privacy.
Wednesdays sentencing marks one of the most important watersheds in U.S. history. It marks the day when the state formally declared that all who name and expose its crimes will become political prisoners or be forced, like Edward Snowden, and perhaps Glenn Greenwald, to spend the rest of their lives in exile. It marks the day when the country dropped all pretense of democracy, obliterated checks and balances under the separation of powers and rejected the rule of law. It marks the removal of the mask of democracy, already a fiction, and its replacement with the ugly, naked visage of corporate totalitarianism. State power is to be, from now on, unchecked, unfettered and unregulated. And those who do not accept unlimited state power, always the road to tyranny, will be ruthlessly persecuted. On Wednesday we became vassals. As I watched the burly guards hustle Manning out of a military courtroom at Fort Meade after the two-minute sentencing, as I listened to half a dozen of his supporters shout to him, Well keep fighting for you, Bradley! Youre our hero! I realized that our nation has become a vast penal colony.
If we actually had a functioning judicial system and an independent press, Manning would have been a witness for the prosecution against the war criminals he helped expose. He would not have been headed, bound and shackled, to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. His testimony would have ensured that those who waged illegal war, tortured, lied to the public, monitored our electronic communications and ordered the gunning down of unarmed civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen were sent to Fort Leavenworths cells. If we had a functioning judiciary the hundreds of rapes and murders Manning made public would be investigated. The officials and generals who lied to us when they said they did not keep a record of civilian dead would be held to account for the 109,032 violent deaths in Iraq, including those of 66,081 civilians. The pilots in the Collateral Murder video, which showed the helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad that left nine dead, including two Reuters journalists, would be court-martialed.
The message that Mannings sentence, the longest in U.S. history for the leaking of classified information to the press, sends to the rest of the world is disturbing. It says to the mothers and fathers who have lost children in drone strikes and air attacks, to the families grieving over innocent relatives killed by U.S. forces, that their suffering means nothing to us. It says we will continue to murder and to wage imperial wars that consume hundreds of thousands of civilian lives with no accountability. And it says that as a country we despise those within our midst who have the moral courage to make such crimes public. ..................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/bradley_manning_and_the_gangster_state_20130821/
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Chris Hedges: Bradley Manning and the Gangster State (Original Post)
marmar
Aug 2013
OP
"If we actually had a functioning judicial system and an independent press, Manning would have been
xiamiam
Aug 2013
#2
"the day when the US state formally declared that all who name and expose its crimes will become
99th_Monkey
Aug 2013
#3
"Wednesday’s sentencing marks one of the most important watersheds in U.S. history. "
geek tragedy
Aug 2013
#4
Faryn Balyncd
(5,125 posts)1. "It signals the inversion of our moral and legal order..."
"If we actually had a functioning judicial system and an independent press, Manning would have been a witness for the prosecution..."
xiamiam
(4,906 posts)2. "If we actually had a functioning judicial system and an independent press, Manning would have been
a witness for the prosecution against the war criminals he helped expose."
hurts my heart
thanks for posting
99th_Monkey
(19,326 posts)3. "the day when the US state formally declared that all who name and expose its crimes will become
political prisoners or be forced, like Edward Snowden, and perhaps Glenn Greenwald, to spend the rest of their lives in exile."
How fucked we are.
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)4. "Wednesday’s sentencing marks one of the most important watersheds in U.S. history. "