Criminal Behavior Should Be Punished

In a nation of laws, criminal behavior must in some way be punished. Three former employees in the Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, school system, have been charged with embezzling funds from the school system, and have pleaded guilty to felony fraud. A fourth former employee, who knew of the crime but did not report it, has pleaded guilty to misprision of a felony, which is itself a felony crime. In some jurisdictions this crime is called being an accessory after the fact.

The United States government and the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office cooperated in this case, prosecuted by the United States Attorney's Office.

Good for us--and good for our government.

But elsewhere, in the world beyond Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, our government has been holding a man who refused to be an accessory after the fact to torture and other felony crimes. His name is Bradley Manning. He has been imprisoned--illegally--for more than a year. Most of that time he has been kept in solitary confinement, and tortured. He has not been charged with a crime, because if the United States government charges Bradley Manning with releasing documents about its own felony crimes, he will claim in his defense that he was doing what United States law requires him to do when he knows that felony crimes have been committed.

How can we do this? We aren't doing it; the officer in charge of this country, who has sworn to uphold this country's laws, is doing it: and we are letting him do it.

Had Bradley Manning not released the documents which he discovered, related to secret felony offenses, he would have become himself a felon.

Barack Obama knows this. He is a Harvard lawyer--and Harvard lawyers know that misprision of a felony is a serious crime. But as officer in charge of the United States government, Obama wants to hide those felony crimes our nation has committed: to cover them up. And that makes Obama a felon, too.

We have lost our constitutionally guaranteed Right of Habeas Corpus; both Obama and his predecessor claim to have "suspended" it. No president, of course, can "suspend" the constitution. Only a dictator can do that.

And for more than a year, now, Obama has held Bradley Manning in prison, illegally. Punitively: though Bradley Manning has not been charged with a crime, Obama has proclaimed publicly that he is guilty: "He broke the law."

Obama has refused to let the United Nations Human Rights lawyers interview Bradley Manning in private.

Misprision of a felony is itself a felony crime under United States civil law, and under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

But Obama doesn't care. He is a rogue president. The prima facia evidence of his public conduct indicts him as a criminal for violating the oath he took upon assuming his office. Obama swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States. He has violated that oath, and continues in his arrogance to violate it every day.

Remarkably, so many of my supposed friends agree with him: friends whom I never would have expected to say "My country, right or wrong: but my country." I am ashamed: but not just of them. I am ashamed of me, too. But I am proud of Bradley Manning, and proud of those who support him.

Maybe I will manage to get brave enough to support him more actively myself.

If I don't, I will be morally guilty in the same way that Obama is guilty: of imprisoning, torturing, persecuting a national hero. And I don't want to be what Obama is.

Bert G. Hornback