John Judis isn’t celebrating the verdict, despite Manning’s acquittal for the most serious charge of “aiding the enemy”:
The trial itself should never have taken place. The military should have accepted Manning’s admission of guilt last February. In my opinion, he had already served long enough, and suffered sufficiently under brutal conditions, to pay for violating his trust as a soldier in military intelligence. But the military might still have exacted a few more years of confinement in a plea bargain. Instead, they sought to stage a show trial. The case they made that Manning had aided the enemy—replete with doctored quotations from emails—would have made Roger Ailes blush. But perhaps they knew what they were doing all along. By focusing attention on the truly horrific charge, they convinced the judge to support a charge that was merely god awful.
Burt Likko predicts that if Manning was as justified as his supporters claim, he can expect a pardon:
Manning, along with his spiritual cohort Edward Snowden, almost certainly had sober and significant moral and legal concerns about things they saw the government was doing, about the reach of the security state in terms of both its intrusiveness and its lack of meaningful checks and controls. The public may very well benefit from their exposure of what the security state was doing in the form of the creation of some sort of meaningful controls and balancing of individual privacy rights against (or, as I prefer to say, “with”) the need to keep the nation secure and at peace.
So if the public has benefitted from these violation of the law, that is one of the reasons that executives have the power to grant clemency. If Bradley Manning can demonstrate that the nation has tangibly benefitted from his data dump to Wikileaks, then the place to argue that is not in a court-martial, which is charged with determining the truth of whether a particular law was violated. The place to argue that is in a request for a commutation of sentence or a pardon, addressed to the President of the United States.
Like Judis, David Harriss Gershon believes Manning has already served enough prison time:
Seriously, I don’t want to hear any lectures about how Manning deserves this time because he “broke the law.” If he had illegally tortured Guantanamo detainees for the CIA, or even orchestrated such torture programs – illegal per U.S. and international law – he could very well have been promoted, if not left alone. The Manning verdict’s central message, aside from this obvious hypocrisy and the injustices underlying it, is this: if you are a whistleblower in this country, do what Edward Snowden did (and what Daniel Ellsberg suggests): flee America, and fast.
The sentencing for Manning begins today and Kevin Gosztola is live-blogging.
The Dish 