Bradley Manning ‘trial’: Criminal Pentagon Refuses to hear War Crimes Motive as Defence
by judd Saturday, Jan 19 2013, 9:44pm
international / prose / post

The crucifixion of a brave young soldier that allegedly leaked irrefutable evidence of US war crimes continues in the now proven criminal and lawless USA.

In yet another instance of America’s flagrant lawlessness, the selected female puppet judge in the Bradley Manning railroading case has ruled against allowing Manning’s legal team to submit war crimes exposure motives for releasing incontrovertible evidence of the fact.

It is to the eternal shame of America that this case is even allowed to proceed, as the criminally accused Pentagon is sitting in judgement of the accuser/whistleblower, Manning!

Only in America is this degree of legal inversion evident today. We take into consideration the corrupt ICC and the centralist courts of Russia and China but nowhere is this level of legal perversion as obvious as it is in the USA -- criminal corruption and lawlessness your name is America! The last historical instance of this degree of flagrant legal corruption occurred in Nazi Germany in the mid-twentieth century; however, today America stands alone as the ‘legal’ torturer, kidnapper, ‘kill list’ assassin, indefinite detention without charge or recourse to due process, lawless nation in the civilised world -- and there is no avoiding the reams of incriminating and damning EVIDENCE in the public domain!

We do not expect the morally bankrupt, socially paralysed and intellectually lobotomised American masses to even understand or comprehend the searing injustices and heinous crimes their nation commits on innocent people at home and abroad; however, be acutely aware that the WORLD is in NO DOUBT as to the CRIMINAL STATUS of America and its servile cohorts in crime -- American denial only extends to its own borders!


Report from CommonDreams follows:

Judge Denies Manning's Whistleblower Defense
by Beth Brogan

In a significant—but not unexpected— blow to his defense, a military judge has ruled that Bradley Manning's attorney may not argue that Manning's motive in releasing documents and the damning video "Collateral Murder" to WikiLeaks was to call attention to US war crimes. [How’s dem apples?]

Manning's lawyer, David Coombs, has said he would argue that Manning did not knowingly damage US interests, but instead would make a case that Manning was a whistleblower and acted in good faith in releasing the information, including the video documenting the shooting and killing of 11 individuals, including a Reuters photographer and small children, by American troops.

Manning, who on Friday served his 966th day in prison without trial, is scheduled for a June court martial on charges that he allegedly released confidential documents and videos relating to the Afghan and Iraq wars to WikiLeaks. Coombs said the whistleblower argument was key to his defense.

The Guardian reports that Colonel Denise Lind "ruled that general issues of motive were not relevant to the trial stage of the court martial, and must be held back until Manning either entered a plea or was found guilty, at which point it could be used in mitigation to lessen the [clearly predetermined] sentence."

Lind also ruled that Coombs may not present evidence that the documents released to WikiLeaks caused little or no damage to US national security.

Coombs will be able to raise that evidence when addressing the specific charge of aiding the enemy, as FiredogLake's Kevin Gosztola points out, "in order to prove he did not know passing information to WikiLeaks would result in 'dealing with the enemy.'"

And The Guardian adds:

Lind's ruling means that some of the most impassioned statements by Manning about why he embarked on the massive transfer of information to WikiLeaks will now not be heard at trial. In the course of a now famous web chat he had with the hacker-turned-informer Adrian Lamo, Manning wrote : "information should be free / it belongs in the public domain / because another state would just take advantage of the information … try and get some edge / if its out in the open … it should be a public good."

Last week, prosecutors said that if Manning had released documents to The New York Times instead of WikiLeaks, they would still charge him with aiding the enemy. Never before has a soldier been jailed for releasing information to the media.

The Los Angeles Times subsequently published an editorial criticizing "the federal government's unprecedented targeting, in recent years, of whistleblowers and those who leak to the press," and calling the charge of aiding the enemy "excessive."

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/01/18-5