Who are our “enemies” today that might glean some nifty info from the release of this material? Who now defines “our enemies”–the president?

There’s a long list of nations that were at one time our friends and another, our enemies. We overthrew our British rule and we now have tea with our best friends in our various “coalitions of the willing.”

We surely hated Germany until they took down that dang wall, and now we can;t get enough of them. At the moment, we’d like them to save Europe from financial catastrophe. Thank you very much.

We were great pals with Iran and Cuba until their dictators were overthrown.

Those communists, those Russians — “frenemies” I guess with our longstanding collaboration interrupted by the long Cold War. Read the daily paper to know if we like or despise the Russians today, because it sometimes seems to change that fast.

George Bush spelled out the bad guys with the phrase Axis of Evil (Iran, Iraq, and North Korea). I guess we’re working on an update now, because Iraq is our friend again, loving its new democracy, following our overthrow of its government and savage destruction of so much of the country and its citizenry.

The Afghans? Well, we loved to see them fight off those durn Ruskies. As with all our friends, we armed them to the teeth, but as with so many of our friends turned enemies, they now use our arms against us.

Al Quaeda doesn’t have a country, but we’ve spent billions upon billions of dollars and thousands and thousands of lives to defeat them. We now say we’ve won on that score, and Al Quaeda is all but destroyed, … except of course when it comes to Bradley Manning. In order to prosecute this heroic patriot, we temporarily redefine Al Quaeda as an ever-present threat that could come at us from all manner of countries. Those countries themselves are not our enemies, well, unless they harbor those doggone terrorists. The harboring’s a problem. Forget the daily paper, leave the TV news on all the time if you want to know our current stance on Pakistan.

Where is the dirty rat who read something released on WikiLeaks and suddenly knew just how to bring the United States to its knees? Perhaps he’s a guy with a cabin in the woods with not much going for him. Perhaps he’s a teenager who mostly wants to get back at his “Fascist” parents. Maybe she’s a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and/or Iraq who is now so disillusioned she talks with friends of getting back at the government that left her a broken woman.

I don’t know. And neither do you. And neither does the president. And neither does Judge Lind.

The prosecution of Bradley Manning for “aiding the enemy” is a cruel hoax. If the government succeeds in crucifying this young man to pay for the sins of bureaucrats Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Obama, and a host of others, it will be one of the darkest days in our history, one for which we should all feel rightfully ashamed.

Mr. Coombs appears to have an eagle eye in his watchful monitoring of every word spoken or written pertaining to PFC Manning’s case. Mr. Coombs’ high intelligence, specialized knowledge, vigilance and perseverance are reassuring.

It would be amazing if it turns out that the Government simply does not have a viable case against PFC Manning. Their circular arguments are like the fabulous Klang bird that flies in a spiral of decreasing radius until it ultimately disappears up its own rear end with a loud, resounding “Klang!”

Peace.