Leaking 700,000 docs gets 35 year sentence; killing 700,000 people gets $1.3 million pension‏

Col. Denise Lind, the military judge who sentenced Pfc. Bradley Manning to 35 years for leaking 700,000 classified documents about our criminal Iraq and Afghanistan wars to Wikileaks, sure has a sense of understatement. In addition to the 1,294 days confinement waiting for swift justice Manning gets credit for, Lind also credited him an additional 112 days compensation for "harsh confinement". Wow, eleven months of solitary confinement, forced nudity, sleep and sensory deprivation causing world wide condemnation that compelled his transfer to humane conditions, is dismissed as "harsh treatment". I wonder what Judge Lind would call pulling out Manning's fingernails: "really nasty stuff"?

Manning's sentence in the Kangaroo Court of American military justice was actually pretty light considering the war party demanded 60 years for Manning's audacity on trying to inform the public of their criminal activities. How was his trial a Kangaroo Court, you might ask? For starters, his lawyers were prohibited from mounting a credible defense that Manning was simply following the military code of conduct and international law. His lawyers could not enter into evidence the documents that exposed numerous war crimes and government lies that covered up those crimes. If true, this is conduct Manning was legally and morally compelled to reveal.  Also, the court accepted, without an iota of evidence, that Manning's document release harmed American security and endangered American citizens. Those rulings foreordained a guilty verdict and a miscarriage of justice.

Manning's release of 700,000 documents brings to mind another factoid of 700,000; the approximate number of Iraqis killed in President George W. Bush's phony, made up, senseless and therefore illegal war against Iraq. We'll never know the true number of deaths Bush's criminality caused for two reasons. First, Uncle Sam has toiled mightily to prevent a true accounting, least it bring new calls for W's prosecution. Secondly, his Disaster In Iraq is the war that keeps on killing, as we've left behind tons of depleted uranium from our high tech ordinance that will be deforming and destroying Iraq fetuses for generations to come. Even if the civil war currently raging in Iraq calms down, that fouled landscape must be one sorrowful land not on your Top Ten Vacation List.

And while Manning contemplates his 35 year prison sentence, President Bush contemplates his $1.3 million annual pension in salary and ex-president benefits. The only downside for Bush is that he has to spend this taxpayer financed largesse here in the Good Ol' USA. Once he enters any land that takes the Nuremberg War Crime Trials seriously, he may get to join Manning in a prison cell.