Say, Who's the Enemy? [edited]

Not that Bradley Manning isn't a jackass and a twerp who deserves to be dishonorably discharged if proven guilty, and not that virtually all the information he is alleged to have released isn't of little interest and value, from what I've read it's mostly ho-hum we already guessed that that's what they were saying..

It's that the National Security aparatus has become a state within the state, and their penchant for overweening secrecy has no remaining legitimate purpose to continue now that the Cold War is over. None.


Compare Manning's story with that of Daniel Ellsberg, whose revelations of the Pentagon Papers did matter, and went a long way toward ending another cruel useless war in Asia, one that cost the lives of thousands of Americans (58,267 KIA, 1,711 MIA, over 300,000 WIA) and killed hundreds of thousands of locals.

Ellsberg's case went to trial, but was undone by the furor of Watergate and the government's inability to muster proper evidence.

Kissinger, that mass-murderer and assassin, had the gall to call him "the Most Dangerous Man in America:"



Note that the material Ellsberg released is still classified, despite having now been public knowledge for over forty years.


Ellsberg never served a day in prison, and neither should Manning.


All this violence, death and lying, all this secrecy, all this vicious stupidity for nothing. Absolutely nothing. Vietnam was ultimately meaningless, just as is our continued occupation of random valleys in Afghanistan.


Mr. Obama, what's the purpose? Why are our troops still in harms way?


The executive branch and its putative subordinate the Pentagon are out of control, all of this militarism and secrecy needs to end. Now.


This from Antiwar.com:


Having held Private First Class Bradley Manning prisoner for nine months, under conditions tantamount to torture and beyond doubt intended to break his will, the US Army recombobulated its allegations against him on Wednesday, adding 22 counts to an already lengthy charge sheet.

As a practical matter, these changes probably don’t make a lot of difference to Manning. He’s faced a likely life sentence for nearly a year now. Since the Army’s prosecutors claim they won’t seek the death penalty provided for in one of the new counts, the consequences for him, if convicted, remain pretty much the same.

That new count – "aiding the enemy" per Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice — is really directed not at Manning, but at an assortment of other persons and parties: Wikileaks, Julian Assange, every foreign government and individual on earth … and you. And the act of filing that charge is, oddly enough, tantamount to insurrection against the United States itself.

Let’s unpack this "enemy" thing.

The power to declare war — and thereby to legally categorize a group of persons (historically on, but not necessarily constrained to, the basis of their allegiance to a particular state) as "the enemy" — is exclusively reserved, per the US Constitution, to Congress. Congress hasn’t exercised that power since 1941, and the wars it declared then have long since ended. The United States is not, legally speaking, at war. Thus the US has, legally speaking, no "enemy" to aid.

By charging Manning with "aiding the enemy," the US Army is, in effect, attempting a coup d’etat. It is usurping Congress’s authority and claiming that authority for itself. Since the President of the United States is also Commander in Chief of the US armed forces, the Army is presumably merely the President’s instrument in this matter.

[...]

Who is the "enemy?" Certainly not the (now long-deposed) regime of Saddam’s Iraq, nor the Taliban who ran (and mostly still run) Afghanistan. We can exclude these two as the designated "enemies" for two reasons.

First, not only did Congress (to the extent that the executive branch bothers even formally acknowledging that institution’s authority these days) not declare war on either of them, it specifically declared that it was not declaring war on them. If you don’t believe me, look at the "authorizations for use of force" yourself and read the "war powers reservations" sections. Recall that bills were introduced to declare war on both, and rejected.

Secondly, no one has said, with a straight face at least, that Manning intended his alleged releases of information for the eyes and ears of the Taliban, or of al-Qaeda, or of whatever ragged remnant of the Ba’ath Party persists in Iraq.

On the contrary: The intended recipients seem to have been an Iceland-hosted web site, an Australian transparency activist, and the world (including the American) media and public. They (You! Me!) are the "enemy" to whom Manning allegedly disclosed the state’s embarrassing secrets.

QED, the US government considers you — whoever you are, wherever you may live, and to whatever extent you aren’t its active agent — its enemy and intends to treat you as such. Your freedom, perhaps even your very survival, depends on you recognizing this fact and acting accordingly.



---

Side note: Not that the entire Watergate and Ellsberg story doesn't deserve critical scrutiny in it's own right. I think that Nixon did have powerful enemies within the elite that wanted to destroy him, and that there were things going on behind the scenes within the power elite from the Kennedy assassination to the rise of Reagan that were very fishy. Ellsberg may have gotten off the hook because he was meant to.. That's a conjecture, but I think an utterly obvious one. He certainly had very powerful allies the likes of which Pfc. Manning does not.



===