By Dave Lindorff
There was an old 1978 Saturday Night Live skit that hit dangerously close to the truth about how modern US society deals with those it fears. Steve Martin, playing a 12th century judge, Theodoric of York, is confronted with the case of a woman, Lorraine Newman, charged with being a witch. With the townsfolk calling for her to be burned at the stake for "consorting with the devil," he says the only way to determine her guilt or innocence is to put her in the "trough of justice" -- a deep vat of water into which her bound body will be cast. Theodoric advises the woman that she has "nothing to fear" since if she is guilty her body will float, rejected by the waters of justice, but if she's innocent she will sink. When her body sinks, Theodoric announces, as a few rising bubbles indicate she has drowned, "Ah! Not guilty!" Leaving her in the tank, he then moves on to the next case.
The trial of Pvt. Bradley manning has far too much in common with this skit to be funny. Manning, a young man of principle who said he had decided to release hundreds of thousands of documents exposing the true brutal nature of the US war on Iraq and the so-called war on terror, as well as the self-serving crudeness and imperial corruption of US global diplomacy, stood accused in a military court of hugely inflated "crimes," including causing death and injury of American troops, aiding the enemy, harming America, and treason. The judge, Col. Denise Lind, proved to be an even a more ludicrous mockery of justice than Martin's Theodoric of York. Blatantly promised a big promotion by the Obama Pentagon as an inducement to assure a guilty verdict against Manning, she assured that the trial was conducted largely in secret, and denied all efforts by the defense to have Manning freed based on the year he spent being tortured and held without charge by his military captors in what was a transparent effort to get him to cut a deal blaming his document release on the organization Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange.
In the end, Manning was tossed into the trough of justice and found duly guilty of all but the most ludicrous charge of "aiding the enemy," and was left to face a possible 90 years in jail which, for a 26-year-old man, would be a life sentence...
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent three-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.
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