<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div role="article"><div class="_1x1"><div class="userContentWrapper"><div class="_wk"><div id="id_5216a0ffa0f9d2083919698" class="text_exposed_root text_exposed">Chris Hedges on Manning's sentence:</div><div id="id_5216a0ffa0f9d2083919698" class="text_exposed_root text_exposed"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" class="userContent"><br></span></div><div id="id_5216a0ffa0f9d2083919698" class="text_exposed_root text_exposed"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" class="userContent">Although it was less than I thought
the judge was going to throw at him, my gut reaction was quite
emotional. I mean, I was quite upset. And I think that that's because
this is part of a larger process by which any attempt to shine a light
on the inner workings of power is not only being shut down, but those
with a conscience who attempt to info<span class="text_exposed_show">rm
the wider public of, in the case of Manning, crimes that have been
committed, war crimes, have become in this society criminals.<br> <br>
The whole moral and legal system has been inverted, and you have a
criminal class, whether that's on Wall Street, whether that's running
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, whether that's running our offshore
penal colonies and torture centers, whether that is the use of
electronic surveillance to sweep up all of the communications of most
Americans--we are seeing all of the traditional checks by which we are
able to thwart government tyranny ripped down.<br> <br> And so I look at
what happened to today is a kind of process, and a very depressing
process, whereby not only civil liberties are shredded, but finally any
capacity for the investigation and uncovering of the abuse of power is
effectively thwarted. So, yeah, it's part of a larger picture. I felt
heartbroken for him personally, but I think on some level also
heartbroken for the rest of the country.<br> <br> Well, I mean, these
sentences are ridiculous. I mean, I covered the war in Bosnia, and, you
know, one knows from the history of Bosnia that when Princip
assassinated Ferdinand, the archduke, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, and his wife, he received a 20-year sentence.<br> <br> We have
just gone crazy within this prison system, whether it's for drug
offenses, whether it is for, you know, purportedly espionage, the use,
the misuse of the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers, and these
people are locked up for staggering amounts of time. So as a former
reporter for The New York Times, as someone who was published top-secret
information--and let's remember that everything that Manning disclosed
was never classified as top-secret. It was all secret. Four to five
million people had access to it. It's a very low-level form of
intelligence information. This has a kind of--you know, more than a
chilling effect, but essentially throws any kind of journalistic
activity into the deep freeze. It becomes impossible to investigate the
security and surveillance state, number one because they can trace all
communications, so they know who would be talking to reporters. And
number two, the consequences, as we have seen with Manning and as we are
seeing with Snowden and as we will see if they ever get their hands on
Julian Assange, which they seem intent to do or would like to do, are
just now so severe that it thwarts the traditional mechanism by which
the fourth estate, the press, was once able to investigate power and
shine a light onto the inner workings of power. All of that has been
shut down, in essence. It's all gone dark.<br> <br> Defense strategy was
clear from the beginning, and that was to plead with the court. Now,
let's remember the defense's hands were tied. They couldn't present much
of the information to the court because it was technically classified.
They were not allowed to use as a defense Manning's right under
international law, and I think even under the U.S. military code, to
expose war crimes, I mean, in fact his duty to expose war crimes. All of
that was denied to the Manning defense team. And so in essence their
hands were tied. And Coombs, who, you know, I have great respect for,
essentially went down, I think, probably the only route that he thought
he could go down, and that was to plead. And we saw that with his
opening statement. We saw that with Manning's own statement of remorse. I
think it's sort of tragic in a way that Manning was forced into this
position, because in my mind he is a political prisoner. In my mind,
what he carried out is an act of conscience. And yet that defense was
never--or that possibility of that kind of defense was never offered to
him by Judge Lind.<br> <br> Well, Obama has used the Espionage Act now,
if we count Snowden, seven times against whistleblowers, people who have
uncovered fraud, war crimes, abuse, government malfeasance, and given
that information to the wider public through the press. Kiriakou, the
former CIA agent is now serving a 30-year sentence in a Pennsylvanian
prison. And that is a misuse of the Espionage Act, which is the
equivalent of our foreign secrets act. It's designed to be used against
people who give people information to groups that are classified as the
enemy. Between 1917, when it was written, and 2009 when Obama took
office, it was used three times against whistleblowers, including
against Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Obama, of
course, now has more than doubled that.<br> <br> And that has become the
mechanism by which they have essentially shut down any kind of press
investigation into the inner workings of power. And so, again, you know,
using the Espionage Act to go after Manning is part of that wider
campaign to make it impossible for those of us on the outside to
understand what authority is doing and not more importantly the abuse of
authority. </span></span></div><div id="id_5216a0ffa0f9d2083919698" class="text_exposed_root text_exposed"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" class="userContent"><span class="text_exposed_show"><br></span></span></div><div id="id_5216a0ffa0f9d2083919698" class="text_exposed_root text_exposed"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" class="userContent"><span class="text_exposed_show">[<a href="http://therealnews.com">therealnews.com</a>]</span></span></div></div></div></div></div><div class="fbTimelineUFI uiCommentContainer"><form rel="async" class="live_10200660490934528_316526391751760 commentable_item hidden_add_comment collapsed_comments" method="post" action="/ajax/ufi/modify.php" data-live="{"seq":0}" id="u_2k_3"><div class="fbTimelineFeedbackHeader"><div class="fbTimelineFeedbackActions clearfix"><span class="UFIBlingBoxTimeline"><span data-reactid=".r[sngp]"></span></span><span class="UIActionLinks UIActionLinks_bottom" data-ft="{"tn":"=","type":20}"><a class="UFILikeLink" href="https://www.facebook.com/cgestabrook#" role="button" aria-live="polite" title="Like this" data-ft="{"tn":">"}" data-reactid=".r[4ye7w]"></a></span></div></div></form></div></body></html>