Recently, I sat in the barber shop waiting for my turn in the chair. A gentleman who sat next to me said to the several of us in the room that he’d had it with this Wikileaks guy, Bradley Manning. He said, “They ought to execute him.”
Some mumbling came from various places. I said, “Shouldn’t he get a trial first? He’s only been accused. He hasn’t been found guilty.”
The gentleman looked at me oddly, and said, “No. He shouldn’t get a trial.”
I said, “Everyone gets a trial.”
To which he said, “Well, not everybody should get one. They don’t get trials in other places, like England, do they?”
After finally agreeing upon the fact that yes, in England and the rest of the Western world, the accused does get a trial, he rested his case by saying, “Well, all I know is there’s too much of this… what do you call it? Liberalism?”
Turned out he’d been listening to a particular member of the right wing radio personality club.
We ended up chatting about Easthampton, his family, all those sorts of things that people find more vital in the end than politics. Probably the best outcome, though the whole thing was a bit chilling–that’s a shockingly non-democratic opinion, after all. And it’s certainly not a conventionally conservative opinion.
I wonder what he’d make of the following article, about U.S. legal scholars protesting the treatment of Manning? It is something about which Obama should be ashamed. Being accused of something does not merit this kind of treatment, and it’s hard to imagine how you even start to justify it, no matter your political stripe. Rule of law is not a matter of left versus right. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be and mostly hasn’t been until recent years.
From The Guardian:
More than 250 of America’s most eminent legal scholars have signed a letter protesting against the treatment in military prison of the alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, contesting that his “degrading and inhumane conditions” are illegal, unconstitutional and could even amount to torture.
The list of signatories includes Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who is considered to be America’s foremost liberal authority on constitutional law. He taught constitutional law to Barack Obama and was a key backer of his 2008 presidential campaign. …
Under the terms of his detention, he is kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, checked every five minutes under a so-called “prevention of injury order” and stripped naked at night apart from a smock.
Tribe said the treatment was objectionable “in the way it violates his person and his liberty without due process of law and in the way it administers cruel and unusual punishment of a sort that cannot be constitutionally inflicted even upon someone convicted of terrible offences, not to mention someone merely accused of such offences”.
