{"id":20725,"date":"2013-07-18T11:00:13","date_gmt":"2013-07-18T19:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=20725"},"modified":"2013-07-18T11:00:13","modified_gmt":"2013-07-18T19:00:13","slug":"the-manning-show-trial-theseteachablemoments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/18\/the-manning-show-trial-theseteachablemoments\/","title":{"rendered":"The Manning Show Trial: These&nbsp;Teachable&nbsp;Moments"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019m shocked \u2013 shocked! \u2013 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\u2019 \u201cspeedy trial\u201d rules, has now also <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2013\/07\/19\/us\/judge-in-manning-case-allows-charge-of-aiding-the-enemy.html\">ruled <\/a>that Manning can be convicted of aiding an enemy that does not exist. Yes, you read that right: There\u2019s only an \u201cenemy\u201d to aid, in any legal sense, if the United States is at war, a state created by a congressional declaration. There\u2019s been no such declaration since World War II.<\/p>\n<p>Lind had only one legal duty as judge in this case: To dismiss all charges due to the government\u2019s failure to meet the \u201cspeedy trial\u201d deadline. If the United States was, as John Adams put it, \u201ca government of laws, not of men,\u201d that\u2019s exactly what she would have done.<\/p>\n<p>Lind\u2019s superiors had a clear duty as well \u2013 to remove her from the bench after that first illegal ruling and charge her under Article 98 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Any person subject to this chapter who \u2013<\/p>\n<p>(1) is responsible for unnecessary delay in the disposition of any case of a person accused of an offense under this chapter; or<\/p>\n<p>(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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>No, I\u2019m not really shocked that none of this happened. It\u2019s par for the course. Laws, including the \u201csupreme law of the land,\u201d aka the US Constitution, are for us little people. The US government doesn\u2019t 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).<\/p>\n<p>The only reasonable takeaway from the Manning trial is that American \u201crule of law\u201d is a sham. The US government doesn\u2019t operate within the Constitution\u2019s constraints on state power, nor does it honor that Constitution\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>The corollary: If the US government isn\u2019t bound by its own alleged rules, why on Earth would anyone else be?<\/p>\n<p><em>Reprinted from the <a href=\"http:\/\/c4ss.org\/\">Center for a Stateless Society<\/a> under Creative Commons license.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019m shocked \u2013 shocked! \u2013 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\u2019 \u201cspeedy trial\u201d rules, has now also ruled that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-20725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20725"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20732,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20725\/revisions\/20732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20725"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=20725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}