Bradley Manning Is Acquitted Of The "Aiding The Enemy" Charge

I'LL HAVE MORE ABOUT THIS OUTCOME (and the conviction on other charges) at another time. For now, I want to observe how gratified we all can be that this American hero wasn't ordered by the court to create false evidence against himself supporting this charge, as Doreen Hendrickson has been ordered by a federal court to do in her case. Had Manning been subjected to the outrage Doreen is facing, things would have gone worse for him.

To learn about the deep assault on Doreen's rights being practiced simply to frighten you away from CtC (in lieu of any presentation of facts or authorities with which to dispute the book, since there are none) and how it not only is profoundly evil in own right but is a deadly threat to the tattered remnants of the American rule of law, read the brief here, the government's response here and the reply to that response here.

The ramifications of this outrageous assault are obvious. This is the complete collapse of even the pretense of due process and the rule of law.

Shake the walls of the Institute for Justice, the ACLU, the Rutherford Institute, the Center For Individual Rights, Judicial Watch, the Pacific Legal Foundation and every other organization that fancies itself a champion of liberty and the law. Every one of these organizations can and should file immediate amicus briefs explaining to the court in which this outrage is taking place that the world is aware, and is not pleased.

Do the same with the media-- your local outlets, the national MSM and new media like LewRockwell.com, Infowars.com, DrudgeReport.com and so on. Every one of these organizations can and should be denouncing this outrage and making clear that it isn't going to be allowed to take place in a dark alley, as the government would prefer.

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

-Edmund Burke

P. S. It is important to recognize that this unprecedented assault on the rule of law is part of a ten-years-and-counting effort to suppress the ultimate whistleblowing on government malfeasance; a malfeasance of such broad impact and liberty-and-limited-government-significance as to make Edward Snowden's NSA revelations and Bradley Manning's war-crimes revelations pale by comparison.

That's quite a statement, I know. But the whistleblowing being attacked here is the laying bare of 70 years of relentless, deliberate misadministration of the federal tax power.

It is this sustained government misbehavior in regard to the tax power that provides the means for the offenses revealed by both Manning and Snowden, and most other whistleblowers on government crimes over those decades. More, that misbehavior in regard to the tax power is ALSO responsible for an improper diversion of half the wealth of most Americans from their own pockets and purposes into the hands of those operating the state-- and their clients and cronies-- for three generations now.

The fact is, we have an arrogant Leviathan state today, with all its endless evils, because of the long-running government malfeasance CtC has revealed to the world. Those not already familiar with the revelations being attacked by this unprecedented corruption of the judicial authority should read this document and get up to speed.

P. P. S. Although good comes in all shapes and sizes, and each person writing from his or her own heart with his or her own words is best, here is an excellent example of a "letter to the editor" being sent out by one warrior in response to this outrage. Reading it might help get the juices flowing for your own effort.

Mencken on Lincoln

The Sage of Baltimore blew the myths away on this one more than ninety years ago...

XIII. Statesmen

Abraham Lincoln

From five men at random, prejudices: third series, 1922, pp. 171-76. First printed, in part, in the Smart Set, May, 1920, p. 141

Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States — first, murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lin­coln. But despite all the vast mass of Lincolniana and the con­stant discussion of old Abe in other ways, even so elemental a problem as that of his religious ideas — surely an important mat­ter in any competent biography — is yet but half solved. Was he a Christian? Did he believe in the Divinity of Jesus? I am left in doubt. He was very polite about it, and very cautious, as be­fitted a politician in need of Christian votes, but how much genuine conviction was in that politeness? And if his occasional references to Jesus were thus open to question, what of his rather vague avowals of belief in a personal God and in the im­mortality of the soul? Herndon and some of his other early friends always maintained that he was an atheist, but the Rev. William E. Barton, one of the best of the later Lincolnologists, argues that this atheism was simply disbelief in the idiotic Methodist and Baptist dogmas of his time — that nine Christian churches out of ten, if he were alive today, would admit him to their high privileges and prerogatives without anything worse than a few warning coughs. As for me, I still wonder.

Lincoln becomes the American solar myth, the chief butt of American credulity and sentimentality. Washington, of late years, has been perceptibly humanized; every schoolboy now knows that he used to swear a good deal, and was a sharp trader, and had a quick eye for a pretty ankle. But meanwhile the varnishers and veneerers have been busily converting Abe into a plaster saint, thus making him fit for adoration in the Y.M.GA.'s. All the popular pictures of him show him in his robes of state, and wearing an expression fit for a man about to be hanged. There is, so far as I know, not a single portrait of him showing him smiling — and yet he must have cackled a good deal, first and last: who ever heard of a storyteller who didn't? Worse, there is an obvious effort to pump all his human weaknesses out of him, and so leave him a mere moral apparition, a sort of amalgam of John Wesley and the Holy Ghost. What could be more absurd? Lincoln, in point of fact, was a practical politician of long ex­perience and high talents, and by no means cursed with ideal­istic superstitions. Until he emerged from Illinois they always put the women, children and clergy to bed when he got a few gourds of corn aboard, and it is a matter of unescapable record that his career in the State Legislature was indistinguishable from that of a Tammany Nietzsche. Even his handling of the slavery question was that of a politician, not that of a messiah. Nothing alarmed him more than the suspicion that he was an Abolitionist, and Barton tells of an occasion when he actually fled town to avoid meeting the issue squarely. An Abolition­ist would have published the Emancipation Proclamation the day after the first battle of Bull Run. But Lincoln waited un­til the time was more favorable — until Lee had been hurled out of Pennsylvania, and more important still, until the politi­cal currents were safely running his way. Even so, he freed the slaves in only a part of the country: all the rest con­tinued to clank their chains until he himself was an angel in Heaven.

Like William Jennings Bryan, he was a dark horse made sud­denly formidable by fortunate rhetoric. The Douglas debate launched him, and the Cooper Union speech got him the Presi­dency. His talent for emotional utterance was an accomplish­ment of late growth. His early speeches were mere empty fire­works — the hollow rhodomontades of the era. But in middle life he purged his style of ornament and it became almost baldly simple — and it is for that simplicity that he is remembered to­day. The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history. Put beside it, all the whoop-ings of the Websters, Sumners and Everetts seem gaudy and silly. It is eloquence brought to a pellucid and almost gem-like perfection — the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Nothing else precisely like it is to be found in the whole range of oratory. Lincoln himself never even remotely ap­proached it. It is genuinely stupendous.

But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination — "that government of the people, by the peo­ple, for the people," should not perish from the earth. It is diffi­cult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettys­burg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and veto of the rest of the country — and for nearly twenty years that veto was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many con­victs in the penitentiary.