When Law Is Designed to Conceal Government Wrongdoing It Loses Moral Legitimacy — a Point Implied by John Glaser’s Short Essay on the Injustice Done Bradley Manning

02 August 2013

Bradley Manning violated national security laws to reveal the secret evils that Government is doing in America’s name

John Glaser recently asked why Manning is accountable but Government not. He pointed to a number of recent examples:

Bradley Manning's leaks revealed crimes far worse than the ones he has supposedly committed.

The Bush administration lied to the American people in order to justify the war crime of attacking Saddam Hussein's Iraq. . . Trillions of dollars and the death and suffering of millions of people were the consequences of that crime.

The Bush gang also secretly ordered warrantless surveillance of Americans' domestic communications without involving the courts, a blatant violation of both constitutional and statutory law.

[D]on't forget the setting up of a worldwide torture regime that directly violated longstanding international law as well as domestic law, specifically a Convention against torture, passed by Congress and signed by Ronald Reagan, which specifies that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever... may be invoked as a justification of torture."

James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, recently committed perjury when he lied to Congress about whether the National Security Agency collects information on American citizens, a federal crime as it turns out. He issued an apology, but otherwise faces no consequences.

In the U.S., there are crimes the government approves of and those it doesn't.

Contrast Bradley Manning's punishment, for example, with that of the commander in charge of the torture at Abu Ghraib. Manning was subjected to abusive detention and faces more than a hundred years in prison. Col. Thomas M. Pappas, who oversaw the brutal torment of hundreds of detainees got an $8,000 fine.

And so on.

Not to mention President Obama’s multifold expansion of these evils, including his program of fairly indiscriminate drone murders, including of American citizens.

Being historically ignorant, it seems not to occur to the American public that this kind of institutionalized immorality parallels that which exists in autocratic nations, past and present

American pompous self-righteousness is everywhere on display these days — with some people taking Vladimir Putin to task for granting Edward Snowden temporary political asylum in Russia.

Among these short-sighted people (for example) is MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who today assailed President Putin for taking any opportunity to poke America, simply because the Russian autocrat is presiding over a declining power.

What former Representative Scarborough misses is that the United States sorely needs “ecological” niche adversaries to hold America’s arrogance and excesses in check — for the benefit of the Whole.

The fact that Russia is not a democratically liberal state is beside the point. America’s violent hubris is everywhere, and it is understandable that other nations — democratic or not — want to balance American power in self-interested ways that preserve their own freedom(s) of operation.

A strong argument can be made that the equipoised Cold War prevented the anti-democratic evils that America has since made a core element of its foreign and domestic policies. When the Soviet Union faded, America’s self-perceived omnipotence resulted in all manner of demonstrable overreaches.

Instead of recognizing the virtues of a more balanced geopolitical ecology, American pundits and public seem to think that anyone who opposes American heavy-handedness, simply on principle, is evil.

That narcissistic perspective almost universally causes us to miss the real and egregious wrongs that America commits every day in the overlapping names of anti-terrorism and exploitive capitalism.

Being perceptually blind, we fail to see that Bradley Manning broke the law to expose the greater wrongs that national security law is intentionally hiding

For this, Private Manning’s innumerable critics have called him naive (at their kindest) — apparently assuming that pointing to immorality and disproportionate illegality is somehow childish.

What would Jesus have made of that allegation, I wonder?

And why is it that the people, who are most likely to proclaim themselves Christian, are the first to cast stones at a man — who (again arguably) is more likely acting in a manner recommended by their spiritual Mentor than not?

There is creeping spiritual darkness in this state of affairs.

The moral? — When law is used to crush those, who keep us morally honest, we have become exactly like the enemies we pretend to despise

Bradley Manning is and was not the problem.

Our complacent disregard for our own personal and governance flaws is.

Jesus and other spiritual sages have said something about our recurrent inability to see and act on the mote in our own eyes.

But, of course, it is less psychologically taxing to persecute messengers, than it is to look at our complicity in creating the messes that they point to.

PeteFree.com

When Law Is Designed to Conceal Government Wrongdoing It Loses Moral Legitimacy — a Point Implied by John Glaser’s Short Essay on the Injustice Done Bradley Manning