A list of major crimes is bouncing around the Internet. The most are major war crimes as defined under the Nuremburg Code.
Private Manning is mandated to do anything and everything to stop acts that are war crimes. Of course these issues were not argued at his trial in Maryland. The Army's judge declared all the leaked documents excluded from trial -- because they are still classified.
Of course any interested party on earth can read the documents. The dump is online at Wikileaks, most all of it. Here's The List getting attention.
Leaked Documents Summary:
1. There is an official policy to ignore torture in Iraq.
2. There is an official tally of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.
3. Guantanamo prison has held mostly innocent people and low-level operatives.
4. The State Department authorized the theft of the UN Secretary General’s DNA.
5. The U.S. Government withheld information about the indiscriminate killing of Reuters journalists and innocent Iraqi civilians.
6. The State Department backed corporate opposition to a Haitian minimum wage law.
7. The U.S. Government had long been faking its public support for Tunisian President Ben Ali.
8. U.S. officials were told to cover up evidence of child abuse by contractors in Afghanistan.
9. The Japanese and U.S. Governments had been warned about the seismic threat at Fukushima.
10. The Obama Administration allowed Yemen’s President to cover up a secret U.S. drone bombing campaign.
11. Known Egyptian torturers received training from the FBI in Quantico, Virginia.
Two Republican Administrations with continuations today, shamefully. Apart from the Fukushima warning, which had been admitted publicly when the plant was built, we might have thought all of this to be incorrect, unsupported America-hating swill based on official disinformation.
This is not a Democratic or Republican list. Look at the crimes.
Manning gave us the truth. Going forward we wil see an astonishing test for President Obama. Imagine the courage to pardon Manning. The courage to cite the Nuremberg Code and the American prosecutor Robert Jackson. From back when we were the good guys.
Below the squiggle for my creeped-out take on where we're going.
Keep this in mind: Manning was prevented by judicial Order from mounting a Nuremberg Code defense. It is not at all the situation that he mounted the Nuremberg defense and failed.
His lawyer, David Coombs, was not allowed to do enter any part of the evidence as proof of war crimes. So effectively, the Code part of treaty law is now gone from our Uniform Code of Military Justice and from day to day practice. War criminals have only to tag Secret on documents and they can walk. Their hierarchies are not going to prosecute them. Nobody gets promoted for that. The criminals don't even have to win the war.
MSM doesn't notice. Of course not.
That "Collateral Damage" helicopter attack in East Baghdad was almost certainly a planned assault on the Reuters office. They had hit the Al Jazeera earler on and killed people. The U.S. Army ground operation had gone out and grabbed up the Channel 4 news crews and thrown them and their family members into Abu Ghraib. More than a dozen violent attacks on news organizations went off one after the other.
Army spokesmen would have us believe to this day that the chops were out on a routine survey patrol when they happened on armed men -- in fact the Reuters bodyguards. They don't even admit a mistake. "Never Apologize" is the motto, borrowed from Mitt Romney.
The White House has remained silent about war crimes since Obama's first outburst at Manning. They like minimal drama over there. Not quite the smell of death at the Oval Office. It's more to match the 1960s with "The Best and the Brightest" lying their butts off to meat-grinder 2,600,000 Vietnamese at a distance of 9,000 miles.
The worst of Manning is that he shows us macabre "concensus" rituals where lies and bloody murder win every meeting. Manning grabbed up their cables and reports indiscriminately. I have to think that he had Fortune on his side. He got war crimes by the dozens.
Nothing that was done by force and bribery worked. Not in Iraq. Not in Tunisia. Not at Gitmo and at the torture classes. Not in Afghanistan where they needed to back-track infiltration teams and the chain of command never quite grasped what that meant.
Any number of the Manning items read like brain damage. Bribery is not all that hard a tool to apply. Took the Army five years to figure out how to bribe Iraqis.
Helluva policy engine we've got. If it's not silence, then it's consenting to torturing thousands in Iraq and to child rape. Or else it's outright lies that encourage Class A felonies in hopes of feeding more crap into a MSM news cycle. Anything they can do using contractors or Death Squads is A.O.K.
One small good thing in the future: we will see how Obama rates for courage.
Obama has to know about Nuremberg. He has to have read the Code. He has to know about Robert Jackson as well. Jackson was a great writer and the greatest on SCOTUS ever in American history for protecting against government overreach. And he was America's chief prosecutor at Nuremberg while on leave from SCOTUS.
Manning gave us everything... everything to match what Jackson had to convict the top Nazis. And Obama has to know it.
If you take a couple hours you can go through the Manning evidence. The cream of the secrets. Apart from our Death Camps being a lot smaller, it's the same kinds of stuff as at Nuremberg. Murder, torture, nighttime death squads (called SEAL teams), and the like.
I might also mention the revulsion to killing that Europeans experienced in the period after WW I. That first Great War had generated battlefield slaughters with millions of victims. A popular reflection of that revulsion came with a silent film "J'Accuse" in 1919. It has the ghosts of the dead appear, combined in with a romatic rivalry plot, questioning what the living owe the dead in those circumstances.
A clear conscience is the answer in the film. We'll see how Obama makes out at that. If he does pardon Manning against all the political powers of our day, he will be a lion.
Odds on, it will not happen. Obama will not go against the crowd. Rule of law and democracy aren't all that popular in in the political donor class or with their hirelings.