Military justice, goes the saying, is to justice as military music is to music. The old saw isn’t meant to be a compliment. But it looks as if military justice has done right well by itself in the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, who was sentenced yesterday to 35 years in prison.
That punishment was mainly for multiple violations of the Espionage Act, which the Army private broke by uploading hundreds of thousands of secret documents to Wikileaks. A full damage assessment will take years, but some documents ended up on Osama bin Laden’s computer.
The 60 years for which the prosecution asked was not unreasonable, given the fact that Manning disclosed such a vast quantity of secrets and did so while American GIs were serving in war zones. Some documents ended up on Osama bin Laden’s computer. The court, though, had acquitted Manning of aiding the enemy, a count could have resulted in the death sentence.
It’s hard to imagine that the judge, Col. Denise Lind, failed to appreciate the gravity of the issue. Whether the colonel was moved by Manning’s excruciating plea at his sentencing hearing — he spoke of his gender-identity issues, which became acute when he was in the war zone — was unclear. She handed down the sentence in a hearing of but a couple of minutes.
The colonel did give Manning more than the 20 years at which the defense was seeking to cap the sentence. But the way military justice works, Manning could get 120 days off a year for good behavior.
So if he behaves himself and time already served is added in, he could be out after eight years or so.
The most charitable way to put that would be: a serious sentence tempered by mercy.
What a contrast to the way the civilian courts handled the case of Jonathan Pollard. He was another American with access to intelligence — a civilian analyst for Navy intelligence — who pled guilty to a single count of breaking our espionage laws. He passed secrets to Israel and was arrested in 1985.
Like Manning, Pollard also claimed to be acting out of high motives, in Pollard’s case concern over the dangers to the Jewish state of what he was seeing in classified material. The government said he did it for money, and he did receive some cash and jewelry. Yet he always claimed higher motives.
Pollard, in a deal with the government, pled guilty to a single count. But a civilian judge handed down a life sentence. Pollard appealed, arguing that the plea agreement was breached. The appeals court ruled against him — though one judge, Stephen Williams, issued a famous dissent, writing that the government’s behavior in the plea bargain reminded him of Macbeth’s curse against the witches in Shakespeare’s play: “And be these juggling fiends no more believ’d, That palter with us in a double sense; That keep the word of promise to our ear, And break it to our hope.”
Insofar as I’m aware, not a single one of those protesting the prosecution of Bradley Manning ever protested for Pollard. Yet Pollard, for all his error, gave his information to a US ally, one with whom America still shares intelligence. Manning, by contrast, gave our secrets to an anti-American Web site determined to make them public even to our enemies.
Today, nearly 30 years after Pollard was seized, he lies in prison. Not a single president, Republican or Democratic, has seen fit to commute his sentence to time served.
If Pollard had been tried by court-martial, he’d probably be free by now. It’s something to keep in mind when Manning’s apologists start belly-aching about military justice.
The old saying about military justice being like military music sent me toYouTube, where I played the march known as “The National Emblem.” It turns out that military music can be glorious, too.