Bradley Manning and the Gangster State

"As the late Howard Zinn once said, 'There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.'

"I understand that my actions violated the law; I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intent to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.

"If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal."

We will pay for our criminality. We will pay for our callousness and brutality. The world, especially the Muslim world, knows who we are, even if we remain oblivious. It is not Manning who was condemned Wednesday, but us. "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly," Henry David Thoreau wrote, "the true place for a just man is also a prison." And that is the real reason Bradley Manning is being locked away. He is a just man.