Thirty-five years?!?
As you've probably heard, that's the sentence that Bradley Manning just got hit with.
Really, what purpose does such a bloated term serve?
That's more time than a rapist gets.
And it's certainly more time than any torturer at Abu Ghraib ever faced -- by a factor of about ten.
And none of the officers whose alleged war crimes he exposed has ever even been prosecuted for anything.
No, just Bradley Manning, the whistleblower.
Obviously, the Pentagon and the Obama Administration wanted to make an example of him.
But they went way over the line by prosecuting him on espionage charges.
He wasn't secretly sending information to the Iraqi insurgents, or to Al Qaeda, or to Iran, or to North Korea.
He was sending information to the American public because he was deeply disturbed by the immoral actions of his government and because he wanted, in his words, to spark a debate about the U.S. policies that fostered such actions.
And for this he gets 35 years?
That's an outrage. Bradley Manning has served his country well. He admitted he broke some laws, but he was no spy, and he does not deserve this outsized sentence.
If you liked this story by Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine, check out his story Obama, the Pensive War Criminal.
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