Lord Jim wrote:The definition of "traitor" is certainly not limited to , "being convicted of treason under 'the without a confession you can't do it' Andrew standard"....
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!
You have me confused with the person you see in the mirror. The "without a confession you can't do it" standard is
YOUR standard -- the one you used to support your vacuous claim that John Yoo did not make the permissibility of torture the official policy of the United States. (Which is yet another of your "conclusions" based squarely on your refusal even to look at the relevant evidence.)
Read this until you finally understand it:
Manning is guilty of treason only if, no matter what he did, he did it with the intent to betray his country.
As I have said many times, it may well be that Manning is a traitor. (And it is overwhelmingly likely that he is guilty of various federal crimes, even if treason is not one of them.)
But as I have shown many times, the Constitution -- treason being the only crime that is defined therein -- requires proof not only of the bad acts (and there appears to be precious little doubt about that) but also of the motive: Without an intent to betray the US, there is no treason.
I still do not know whether you have finally come around to accepting what the Supreme Court has said over and over. You certainly had not accepted it -- or, as far as I can tell, even grasped it -- when you posted:
Lord Jim wrote:It really makes no difference in fact what his "motivation" is ....
and:
Lord Jim wrote:Actually, you want to pretend that what the little angel claims his "motivation" was makes a rat's ass of difference to the question of whether or not he is guilty of treason.
"My" standard -- which is not really "mine"; it is the standard applicable to every criminal prosecution, from treason to shoplifting -- is very simple: Guilt of a crime requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt of every element of that crime.
In the case of treason, one of the elements of the crime is the intent to betray one's country; Manning is guilty of treason only if, no matter what he did, he did it with the intent to betray his country. Maybe he did. Maybe he is a traitor.
But simply describing what he did is not enough. Not because I say so; because the Supreme Court, the final arbiter in our system of the meaning of the Constitution, says so.
It is possible, regardless of how unlikely it may appear, that Manning did not intend to betray the US. And he need not prove that he did not; the prosecution must prove that he did.
For example, he could have believed that the US's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not in the US's interest -- indeed, that they are directly contrary to the US's interest -- and that by disclosing the information to Wikileaks, he was actually acting in the best interests of the US. It does not matter whether you agree or I agree or anyone else agrees with that assessment. What matters is that acting in what one believes to be the best interests of the US is not acting with the intent to betray the US.
And there is a striking piece of what appears to be undisputed evidence which brings up a question which, quite unsurprisingly, you have refused to answer:
If Manning intended to betray the US, why did he not "adher[e] to [its] Enemies" (U.S. Const., Art. III, Sec. 3) by giving the information directly to one of the US's enemies?
He could easily have given it directly to al-Qaeda or some group that supports al-Qaeda -- they are all over the internet -- but he did not. Why not?
Instead, he gave it to a group that might or might not have redacted it before releasing it. (Even if, in this case, Wikileaks did not redact it, Wikileaks has redacted some of the information it has obtained and disseminated, and Manning had no way of knowing in advance whether his information would be redacted or not.) Why?
But you do not seem to care about the fact that Manning did not share his information with the US's enemies. On the contrary, you seem blissfully -- or, in your case, pertinaciously -- unaware that he did not. You claim that he did:
All that is required to understand that a person who steals hundreds of thousands of classified documents, including one's that detail the sources and methods of ongoing military operations, and makes them available to our enemies is rightly called a traitor ....
Of course, to you, facts are like "legal niceties": If they get in the way, simply ignore them.
Which brings us back around to your "standard" for, well, everything. It goes like this:
"If I,
The Divine Lord Jim, Font And Repository Of All Knowledge And Wisdom, proclaim a thing to be true, that thing is true. If a thing is not true before I proclaim it to be true, it becomes true because I proclaim it to be true. The matter is closed, and puny mortals need only bow in humble and grateful submission."
Reason is valuable only when it performs against the wordless physical background of the universe.
