Bradley Manning Defense Basically Admits His Guilt, Crickets From His Pretend-Left Defenders
You remember the Bradley Manning case, don’t you? The soldier who is charged with leaking classified information to WikiLeaks - that the entire Professional Left was in a tizzy over? And when the President said that Manning broke the law, you couldn’t rest a second without hearing a earful from the same nuts about how the president is declaring someone guilty before trial.
Well, guess what? In news that fell through the crack (and was conveniently ignored by the Pretend Left) a couple of weeks ago, we now know that Manning’s own defense team is essentially admitting to his guilt. Their defense is going to be based on a few things:
The idea that the information released wasn’t really all that sensitive and didn’t hurt US interests, albeit they were classified.
Even though the released material was classified, it really shouldn’t have been.
The chain of command failed to stop Manning from releasing that information.
What’s absent? Even Manning’s defense won’t argue that Manning in fact didn’t release the classified information he’s accused of releasing. Hell, they won’t even argue that the government is failing to meet its burden of proof that he did so. Instead, the defense is simply, “Yeah, well, it’s not that bad. And hey, it’s not his fault that the others didn’t stop him!”
In a very real way, this is an admission by Manning’s defense team that he did, in fact, do exactly what the government alleges: release classified information without authorization. You see, defense lawyers are allowed to say everything to get their client off, except for one thing: they aren’t allowed to lie; they aren’t allowed to say something they know to be false. I strongly suspect that is the reason they won’t be saying that Manning didn’t give the classified information to Wikileaks; because they know that denial to be false. The debate is now about how sensitive the classified information were and whether they should really have been classified.
That - the standards used for classification - is an entirely different debate, and it is a legal policy debate, not a courtroom debate. With the law as is, Manning, as an intelligence analyst, especially as a military intelligence analyst, did not have the right to decide what “should” and should not have been classified. No individual as an instrument of the government has that authority except for the President. You cannot go and shoplift and then argue to the court that what you lifted wasn’t that bad and really, shoplifting that item really shouldn’t be illegal.