.Protesters yesterday interrupted President Obama's speech at a $5,000/ticket San Francisco fundraiser to demand improved treatment for Bradley Manning. After the speech, one of the protesters, Logan Price, approached Obama and questioned him. Obama's responses are revealing on multiple levels. First, Obama said this when justifying Manning's treatment (video and transcript are here):
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"We're a nation of laws. We don't let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law."
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The impropriety of Obama's public pre-trial declaration of Manning's guilt ("He broke the law") is both gross and manifest. How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt?
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See, here's the thing, if you read below you see that our government continues to hold people even when they know they aren't guilt. We are better than this - aren't we?
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And this is (as they say in Queens) cherse...
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Then, in response to Price's raising the case of Daniel Ellsberg, we have this from Obama:
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"No it wasn't the same thing. Ellsberg's material wasn't classified in the same way."
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What Obama said there is technically true, but not the way he intended. Indeed, the truth of the matter makes exactly the opposite point as the one the President attempted to make. The 42 volumes of the Pentagon Papers leaked by Ellsberg to The New York Times were designated "TOP SECRET": the highest secrecy designation under the law. By stark contrast, not a single page of the materials allegedly leaked by Manning to Wikileaks was marked "top secret"; to the contrary, it was all marked "secret" or "classified": among the lowest level secrecy classifications. Using the Government's own standards, then, the leak by Ellsberg was vastly more dangerous than the alleged leak by Manning.