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" Well, it seems that the tolerance of Col. Denise Lind for prosecutorial insanity two degrees to the left of Erich Honecker had its limits. Had Manning been convicted of aiding the enemy, he would have faced a life sentence in prison without the possibility of parole.Civil libertarians feared that a conviction on that charge, which has not been used since the Civil War, would have sent a chilling message to would-be government whistle-blowers. &amp;quot;The heart of this matter is the level of culpability,&amp;quot; said retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, a former chief prosecutor at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He noted that Manning has already pleaded guilty to some charges and admitted leaking secret documents that he felt exposed wartime misdeeds. &amp;quot;Beyond that is government overreach.&amp;quot; The &amp;quot;aiding the enemy&amp;quot; charge was so preposterous on its face, and so evil in its intent, that it tended to obscure how contrary to acceptable American jurisprudence the entire situation -- from his detention to his trial -- regarding Bradley Manning was. But it was in that charge that this administration -- this Democratic administration, headed by a former professor of constitutional law -- demonstrated its willingness, if not its eagerness -- to elevate information into a tin god to whom we are all suppliants, and against whom we have no civil rights worthy of the name. A conviction on this charge literally would have criminalized the dissemination of information, which is the central purpose of the First Amendment, as long as one of our many purported enemies had access to a computer, or a buck to pick up The New York Times at the newsstand in Abbottabad. It would have made free expression subject to the hypothetical future acts of international criminals and sociopaths. The prosecutors claimed that Manning should be punished because the people in the compound in which Osama bin Laden had been murdered had downloaded some of the information that Manning had released to WikiLeaks, as if that proved Manning&amp;#039;s desire to assist our &amp;quot;enemies,&amp;quot; and not the fact that the Internet is a marvelous environment for getting out the word. This is the logic of authoritarians. That it was pursued so vigorously by a putatively democratic state should terrify us all. Many legal analysts said earlier that a conviction of Manning would mark a new precedent in prosecutions of U.S. secret leakers because the Army private never actually shared the information directly to an enemy of the U.S. &amp;quot;Most of the aiding-the-enemy charges historically have had to do with POWs who gave information to the Japanese during World War II, or to Chinese communists during Korea, or during the Vietnam War,&amp;quot; Duke law school professor and former Air Force judge advocate Scott Silliman told the Associated Press. That anyone in this government thought this is a good idea is something worth studying. Manning&amp;#039;s going to go to jail from now until Christ alone knows when. The people who thought this up are still going to have good government jobs. Something&amp;#039;s not right with that. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a24088/bradley-manning-case-ends/>