It's not with any intention to sound controversial that I ask this; in my opinion, he should be a free man and several dozen current and former members of the US government should be donning orange boiler suits along with a few hundred CEOs and military officers. I ask because I think even his supporters who, at best, hoped for a humane sentence feared that he would receive a life term - especially as some extremists called for his death.
It seems to me that the sentence is the result not of justice but of political compromise. Long enough to keep the authoritarians happy whilst not quite so long as to stir up the liberals and libertarians into a riotous and dangerous cocktail.
However, it is a grim prospect for a man who's motives were immensely honourable to be facing three and a half decades in prison and the consequences thereafter. At this moment, it would seem that only the overthrow of the corrupt and vile system which has consumed America and most of the rest of the planet would offer any hope for his exoneration.
There are many fools in positions of power who cannot see the corruption and wickedness in front of their noses and who in their blindness prop up the rot. There are millions who are enslaved by their own ignorance in the belief that the austerity they endure is a necessity for the collective good rather than an element in an osmotic system designed to perpetuate their subordination. The cognitively dissonant who wave the flags of the nations who rob and oppress them must bear the shame of what happened to Bradley Manning, and those like him, as much as the criminal persecutors.
Eyes will reluctantly open as freedom diminishes.
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