I’m shocked — shocked! — that Colonel Denise Lind, the military judge who ruled in February that Bradley Manning could be tried on various charges even after being held prior to arraignment for more than five times the absolute longest time specified in the US Armed Forces’ “speedy trial” rules, has now also ruled that Manning can be convicted of aiding an enemy that does not exist.
Yes, you read that right: There’s only an “enemy” to aid, in any legal sense, if the United States is at war, a state created by a congressional declaration. There’s been no such declaration since World War II.
Lind had only one legal duty as judge in this case: To dismiss all charges due to the government’s failure to meet the “speedy trial” deadline. If the United States was, as John Adams put it, “a government of laws, not of men,” that’s exactly what she would have done.
Lind’s superiors had a clear duty as well — to remove her from the bench after that first illegal ruling and charge her under Article 98 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice:
Any person subject to this chapter who —
(1) is responsible for unnecessary delay in the disposition of any case of a person accused of an offense under this chapter; or
(2) Knowingly and intentionally fails to enforce or comply with any provision of this chapter regulating the proceedings before, during, or after trial of an accused; shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
No, I’m not really shocked that none of this happened. It’s par for the course. Laws, including the “supreme law of the land,” aka the US Constitution, are for us little people. The US government doesn’t need or want them, except for use as camouflage. It does whatever it wants to do (or rather whatever the ruling members of the American political class tell it to do).
The only reasonable takeaway from the Manning trial is that American “rule of law” is a sham. The US government doesn’t operate within the Constitution’s constraints on state power, nor does it honor that Constitution’s list of enshrined individual rights. It never has done so absent extreme compulsion and it never will do so on anything like a regular basis.
The corollary: If the US government isn’t bound by its own alleged rules, why on Earth would anyone else be?
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Citations to this article:
- Thomas L. Knapp, The Manning Show Trial: These Teachable Moments, Counterpunch, 07/19/13
- Thomas L. Knapp, The Manning Show Trial: These Teachable Moments, Antiwar.com, 07/18/13
have an authority for this? I've checked over the Uniform Code of Military Conduct and see no such provision. Further, other provisions of the UCMC are clearly invoked for "enemies" in undeclared conflicts: the simplest example is medals, which require various kinds of engagement with "the enemy." Lots of medals have been awarded for Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, none of which were declared wars. Even worse for your argument, both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts were authorized by conflicts, and since Al Qaeda was claimed to be involved in one way or another in both conflicts, and that is the enemy alleged by the govt to have been aided by Manning's actions, you are close enough to "declared war" to be a conflict that everyone in the government considers authorized, to have an enemy, and which has not been successfully challenged in court. Given that some of Manning's releases were directly about an authorized conflict in which the US was engaged (and which therefore had an enemy as far as the military was concerned), it's quite a stretch to claim there is no enemy for him to have aided.
A quick google search yields: http://usmilitary.about.com/library/milinfo/ucmj/…
Ahh. But in most cases, the judge will not allow the US Constitution to be brought up or used by the defense. Michael New was not allowed. The judges are able to frame the court in such a way that the defendent is no longer innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, he must show beyond any doubt that he is innocent with both hands tied behind his back. This is justUS in the USSA.