Lamar W. Hankins : The Tyranny of the Manning Trial

Pfc. Bradley Manning. Graphic by DonkeyHotey / Flickr.

A failure of the justice system:
The tyranny of the Manning trial

Pfc. Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in a military prison for embarrassing the government in a trial that grossly violated the constitutional guarantee of due process.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / September 3, 2013

The right to due process is the bedrock of the right to trial in this country. The recently concluded trial of Pfc. Bradley Manning [who has since expressed her intention to live as a woman and be known as Chelsea Manning] demonstrates that Manning did not receive due process, that is, procedural fairness and government actions that follow the law in all relevant aspects. Both the military courts and the civilian courts are controlled by the same Constitution, though Manning’s trial calls this proposition into question.

Certainly, Manning received the outward appearances of due process: he received notice of the charges against him; he had a jury trial presided over by an apparently unbiased judge; he was represented by able counsel; he had adequate time to prepare for trial; to a limited extent, he was given notice of the evidence against him, allowed to present evidence in his own defense, and permitted some cross-examination of the witnesses who testified against him; a written record was made of the proceeding; and the basis of the decision against him was made known.

If that’s all that were required, we could put this case behind us and move on, but the full story of the persecution (it was not just a prosecution) of Manning requires a more complete look at what the government did to him.

Manning was sentenced to 35 years in a military prison for leaking to WikiLeaks more than 700,000 classified files from the U.S. State Department, diplomatic cables, powerpoint presentations, lists of military addresses, military databases, videos of military actions, documents related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other similar materials.

No one disputes that Manning leaked these materials. What is disputed is how he should be dealt with for what he believed was his duty to expose wrongdoing.

Manning was charged with violations of Army regulations: failure to obey a lawful order or regulation, aiding the enemy, knowingly giving intelligence to the enemy through indirect means, wrongfully storing classified information, and related infractions.

From the beginning of Manning’s case, however, the government engaged in misconduct. After he was arrested he endured 11 months of solitary confinement in conditions that the United Nations special rapporteur on torture considers, based on article 16 of the convention against torture, as cruel, inhuman, and degrading -- very near to torture:

The special rapporteur concludes that imposing seriously punitive conditions of detention on someone who has not been found guilty of any crime is a violation of his right to physical and psychological integrity as well as of his presumption of innocence.

Had the special rapporteur been allowed private access to Manning as a part of his investigation, he would have been able to gauge whether Manning’s treatment amounted to torture. Officials at the Pentagon denied the special rapporteur private communications with Manning, thus thwarting a complete investigation into the conditions of his imprisonment, a violation of human rights procedures according to the UN.

Manning was forced to sleep naked facing a lamp, confined to a 6-by-8 foot cell for over 23-and-a-half hours a day, and denied contact with other inmates. When they found him asleep, guards woke him up. When he danced to overcome the boredom, guards considered that he was mentally unstable. Besides, dancing was not a form of exercise approved by his jailers.

Manning’s harsh treatment was justified by his guards as punishment for the most serious charge -- aiding the enemy -- though he had not been convicted of any crime at the time (and subsequently was found not guilty of aiding the enemy). His pretrial confinement conditions will be one issue taken up on appeal.

Another issue on appeal will be that Manning was denied his right to a speedy trial through a procedure in which an Army commander complied with a prosecution request several times to remove from consideration a period of time that would otherwise have counted toward the speedy trial clock. Such a procedure makes a complete mockery of the right to a speedy trial.

One of the most egregious violations of due process that I have ever heard in my over 35 years of practicing law was the changing of the charges against Manning after the government had rested its case. That is, after all evidence in the case had been presented and closed, the presiding military judge allowed the prosecution to change the charges of larceny to a different offense.

Notice of the charges against a defendant before the trial begins is essential to due process. Changing those charges after all evidence has closed clearly violates the notice requirement.

Some actions relating to witnesses and evidence prevented Manning’s attorney, David Coombs, from pursuing the defense that he had chosen. For example, before the defense was allowed to call a witness, the witness had to be approved by the prosecution. Important evidence that Manning’s attorney wanted to present was not allowed, on the specious ground that it would compromise national security, though the evidence for this is minimal at best.

Further, although Manning could have used the defense that he had a duty under the U.S. military code and international law to which the U.S. subscribes to expose war crimes, he was denied the right to present evidence of this duty by both the court and the prosecution.

Some evidence that could have aided Manning was kept from the defense because it was declared classified. Coombs believes that classification was used to inhibit Manning’s defense. It was the government’s prosecutor alone who decided what classified evidence was beneficial and what was not. Coombs has a security clearance, so he could have looked at the evidence and decided its usefulness to Manning’s defense. That is a decision for trial counsel, not the prosecution.

 In civilian courts, where the prosecution has evidence that could be useful to the defense, but the prosecution is not sure of its usefulness, it is presented to judges privately and they decide what should be given to the defense. Not so in Manning’s trial. On the charge of “aiding the enemy,” of which Manning was found not guilty, Coombs had this to say after the trial:

Well, I think that, for starters, you go with an offense of aiding the enemy, and that offense really is unprecedented. When you look at how that was used in the past and how the government tried to use it in this case, they had to go back to an 1800s case to even make an argument, a colorable argument, as to why you would go after somebody who gave information to a journalist and say that they aided the enemy. That is an unprecedented aspect of this case.

Not only there, but in every other charging decision that they made, they pushed the envelope of, and even strained, any realistic reading of what the law is. And yet, they seemed to not have a problem with that. It was almost a win-at-all-costs mentality. And I think that ultimately will be something on appeal that will get reviewed, and perhaps at that point Brad will get some relief, even on appeal.

The claim of harm caused by Manning’s public disclosures seemed the most important reason for prosecuting him, but whether the disclosures had done actual harm was impossible for the government to prove. Coombs characterized the government’s evidence of harm, presented during the sentencing phase of the trial, as “pure speculation.”

Normally, witnesses are not allowed to speculate, but the government could find no actual evidence of harm to national security, so it was left to present witnesses who could only speculate about possible harm in the future, not even likely harm, but maybe some potential for harm.

It should not be surprising that no harm could be found. According to The Arizona Republic, 5 million government employees and contractors are eligible to see all of the information Manning leaked. U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter believes that the government has far too many records classified -- that we are in a period of “classification inflation.”

As a result, average Americans cannot know what their government is doing in matters that, if publicized, would not harm national security, but would severely embarrass the government.

Such secretiveness prevents journalists from informing the public about matters that we should know if we are to be citizens capable of making informed and intelligent decisions about government policy and practice. Considering the government actions that we do know about, what is surprising to me is that there are not more leaks.

Preventing such leaks is, in part, what the Manning trial was all about -- an attempt to discourage whistleblowing by essentially ending the lives of those who dare to let the public know about the actions of its government and its abuse of its authority. The government wanted Manning sentenced to nearly double the 35 years in prison he received -- a sentence that could have kept him in prison for the rest of his life.

Another troubling aspect of Manning’s trial, directly related to secrecy, was that some of it was closed to the public (and none of it was allowed to be broadcast so the public could see first-hand what the government was doing). Coombs believes that the government used closed sessions to convince the public that some information released by Manning was harmful. Otherwise, there would be no reason for closed sessions.

Coombs and many other observers believe that the government was embarrassed by the content of some of the leaks, as well as by the massive amount of leaks. Especially with regard to the diplomatic cables that became public, Coombs believes that having the truth come out was extremely embarrassing:

I think the damage there was an embarrassment of having other people see that we don’t always do the right thing for the right reasons as the United States, which might come as a surprise to some people. You would think that when we deal with other countries, when we deal with people who are less fortunate than our country, that we’re doing so in a way that helps everybody, that’s in everyone’s best interest.

But that’s not always the case. And, in fact, frequently we do things that are in our own national interests, and sometimes that is to the detriment of people who are struggling to have what we have here in America -- a democracy, a free and open press. And that’s a little disheartening when you see that. And I think that’s probably the biggest damage, because if people actually look to these documents, they will see that we don’t always do what we should do, and we are not always the country that we should strive to be.

Perhaps the most embarrassing leak (released by WikiLeaks), and certainly one of the most damaging to America’s image in the world, was the 2007 video of airstrikes in Baghdad by two Apache helicopter crews that killed a Reuters cameraman and his assistant, along with nine Iraqis, two of whom may have had weapons.

The attack was approved by the crews’ commander via radio communication at the crews’ urging. Not content with the killing and maiming they had just done, at least one of the Apache helicopter crews opened fire just minutes later on a van  that was trying to rescue the wounded. The van was occupied by a family that included two children who were both wounded.

No evidence has surfaced that any of the dead were insurgents. Their behavior did not indicate any activity that would have been considered threatening to nearby U.S. troops. It is not clear whether WikiLeaks obtained the footage from Manning first, or had obtained it before Manning released the material.

Regardless of where the Baghdad airstrike footage originated, what seems clear today is that Manning is, as Coombs described him, “a good young man who did what he thought was morally right, and for the right reasons, and he was sentenced the way we would sentence somebody who committed murder, the way we would sentence somebody who molested a child.”

It is a failure of the justice system, both military and civilian, that the callous, unjustified killing of innocent Iraqis, including children and journalists, has not been redressed, but Pfc. Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in a military prison for embarrassing the government in a trial that grossly violated the constitutional guarantee of due process and was nothing short of tyrannical.

This is a time when all patriotic Americans should be questioning the ability of their government to follow the values that are the foundation of our country. Manning should be at least as free as those who carried out the 2007 massacre in Baghdad.

NOTE: Quotes from David Coombs are from an interview he gave to independent journalist Alexa O’Brien just after the Manning trial ended. To join an effort to free Manning, go here.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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David Van Os : The Homeland Battlefield Bill

Image from Chocolate City.
The Homeland Battlefield Bill

With the stroke of Obama’s pen, the United States military has become a domestic law enforcement authority and American citizens on American soil are subject to the loss of every fundamental right to due process of law.

By David Van Os / The Rag Blog / January 3, 2012

At this turn of the standard solar calendar from the year 2011 to the year 2012, my country has taken another step down the terrible path of abandoning its dedication to the principles that made it stand out with unique brilliance in the history of the human race.

On December 31, 2011, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA). Such bills are normally routine authorization and appropriation acts. This one is different. Known as the “Homeland Battlefield Bill” this act contains a section that aims a dagger at the heart of our most cherished constitutional freedoms.

Section 1031 includes the following language:

(a) In General – Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war.
——
(c) Disposition under law of war – The disposition of a person under the law of war as described in subsection (a) may include the following:
(1) Detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force.”

Translation: a “covered person” may be treated as a prisoner of war.

Prisoners of war don’t get trials. They don’t get to call lawyers. They don’t get hearings to determine probable cause. They don’t get to make bail. They don’t get to apply for writs of habeas corpus.

They have no rights to any components of due process of law. They are simply detained until the war between their country and the other country is over. (Recent world history is full of brutal atrocities illegally committed against prisoners of war, but that is a different topic for a different essay.)

These are standard expectations for enemy soldiers captured in war. So what’s new?

Under this bill, every square inch of the 50 states of the United States is considered a battlefield, and American citizens suspected of supporting the so-called enemy army of terrorists may be treated as prisoners of war. With the stroke of Obama’s pen, the United States military has become a domestic law enforcement authority and American citizens on American soil are subject to the loss of every fundamental right to due process of law.

It might be a different thing if the “war on terrorism” were a war with identifiable armies and soldiers, fought by nation-states, with identifiable targets and objectives. Indeed, the standard first definition of war, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is “a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations."

But this so-called war is, as Rep. Dennis Kucinich calls it, a “war without end." It is not a conflict with a nation-state. It is a conflict with criminal gangs. There is no territory or capital city that can be occupied in a visible manifestation of victory. There will be no end until the politicians decide they no longer need it as a scapegoat to distract voters from the piracy they are suffering every day at the hands of the Wall Street robber barons and their politician stooges.

In other words, it may never end. Persons detained “under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities” may never be released.

As Senator Al Franken said in explaining why he voted against the bill:

And what we are talking about here is that Americans could be subjected to life imprisonment without ever being charged, tried, or convicted of a crime, without ever having an opportunity to prove their innocence to a judge or a jury of their peers. And without the government ever having to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Franken continued that the bill

denigrates the very foundations of this country. It denigrates the Bill of Rights. It denigrates what our Founders intended when they created a civilian, non-military justice system for trying and punishing people for crimes committed on U.S. soil. Our Founders were fearful of the military -- and they purposely created a system of checks and balances to ensure we did not become a country under military rule. This bill undermines that core principle.

A “covered person” under the bill is:

(b)(1) A person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks.
(b)(2) A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.

Well, you might think, no problem. This law only targets the bad guys. Innocent citizens are not in any danger of “disposition under the law of war."

But the whole point of due process of law, the whole point of the English nobles who forced King John to sign the Magna Charta in 1215, the whole point of our fundamental concept that a person accused of a crime is innocent until proven guilty, the whole point of the requirements of probable cause and warrants, the whole point of the right to a fair trial, the whole point of the right to call a lawyer, the whole point of being able to apply to a court for a writ of habeas corpus, is that there are checks and balances to prevent false accusations, false arrests, false convictions, and false imprisonment.

Under the power that has been handed over to the federal government in the new Defense Authorization Act, the checks and balances, the very essence of Constitutional democracy, will be abolished for any American at any time against whom the government decides to level a charge of supporting terrorists. The accusation may be a complete fabrication but there will be nothing the accused citizen can do about it.

The unprincipled politicians who passed this bill occupy both major political parties. Many Democrats in the House and Senate supported it, and a few Democrats opposed it. Many Republicans in the House and Senate supported it, and a few Republicans opposed it.

The apologists for the bill will point to subsection (e), which states:

Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities, relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.

Don’t be fooled by this hollow exercise of political pacification. If you are locked up in a military jail as a prisoner of war with no right to call a lawyer and no right to a hearing or to see the evidence against you, how will you invoke the purported “existing law” this sop extends to you? The same people who locked you up will decide what the “existing law and authorities” are and what they mean. Without due process of law or checks and balances, the “law” is nothing.

Basically, the Homeland Battlefield Bill subjects all Americans to the awful possibility of being treated the way thousands of innocent Japanese-American citizens were treated during World War II, their freedoms abolished through internment in camps for the duration of the war.

Remember John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales? Basically, the Congress in passing this bill, and the President in signing it, rehabilitated the sick and subversive constitutional theories that Yoo and Gonzales promoted during the darkest days of the Cheney-Bush regime.

The apologists may also say that under the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld the federal courts will recognize a right of access to the judiciary to challenge military detentions. Speaking as a lawyer, I agree it is possible that may happen in the federal courts. Also speaking as a lawyer, I remind the apologists that it takes courageous lawyers, piles of money, and years of languishing to get major constitutional cases resolved in the courts.

I am glad for the possibility of judicial correction, but it does not excuse the politicians for what they have done, nor will any successful court challenge give a citizen back the years of freedom lost waiting for the fulfillment of judicial review. Speaking as an American who loves my country and its Constitutional heritage, I am appalled, disgusted, sick at heart, and mad as hell.

[David Van Os is a populist Texas democrat and a civil rights attorney now living in Austin. He is a former candidate for Attorney General of Texas and for the Texas Supreme Court. To receive his Notes of a Texas Patriot -- circulated whenever he gets the urge (and published on The Rag Blog whenever we get the urge) -- contact him at david@texas-patriot.com. Read more articles by David Van Os on The Rag Blog.]

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Jim Turpin : Assassinations, Anyone?

Image from Assassins / IMFDB.
Due process and special ops:
Assassinations, anyone?

By Jim Turpin / The Rag Blog / August 25, 2010

Every American citizen has heard the legal phrase “due process of law," but do you really know what that means?

The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

The Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause has two aspects: procedural and substantive. Procedural due process is concerned with the process by which legal proceedings are conducted. It requires that all persons who will be materially affected by a legal proceeding receive notice of its time, place, and subject matter so that they will have an adequate opportunity to prepare. It also requires that legal proceedings be conducted in a fair manner by an impartial judge who will allow the interested parties to present fully their complaints, grievances, and defenses. The Due Process Clause governs civil, criminal, and administrative proceedings from the pretrial stage through final appeal, and proceedings that produce arbitrary or capricious results will be overturned as unconstitutional.

It surfaced earlier this year that our President (a former constitutional professor of law and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago) is now authorizing, without Congressional consent, and against constitutional authority, assassinations of U.S. citizens abroad. Dana Priest in the Washington Post reported:

As part of the operations, Obama approved a Dec. 24 (2009) strike against a compound where a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting with other regional al-Qaeda leaders. Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC, military officials said...

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy.

Both the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) maintain lists of individuals, called "High Value Targets" and "High Value Individuals," whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year.

Interestingly, during George W. Bush’s reign, there was intense and heated debated over the indefinite detention and torture of “high value individuals” at Black Ops sites across the world (Bagram Air Force Base, Syria, Egypt, etc.). Even Obama criticized the Bush administration during the presidential race and then promised to close Guantanamo after taking office. This has not happened and most likely never will, even though intelligence shows that Guantanamo remains a recruiting tool, used by extremists around the world.

There have been a number of reports that show the complete innocence of these accused “terrorists” whether U.S. citizens or not:

"There are still innocent people there (Guantanamo)," Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. "Some have been there six or seven years..." Wilkerson told the AP in a telephone interview that many detainees "clearly had no connection to al-Qaida and the Taliban and were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Pakistanis turned many over for $5,000 a head."

Glenn Greenwald in Salon (1/27/2010) wrote:

Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests." They're entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations... That's why we have what are called "trials" -- or at least some process -- before we assume that government accusations are true and then mete out punishment accordingly.

But now, there seems to be little or no discussion over the assassination of U.S. citizens for their alleged ties to “terrorist organizations."

The only recent outcry has been from Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) who introduced a bill (HR 6010) titled: "To prohibit the extrajudicial killing of United States citizens, and for other purposes."

Democratic Congressman Kucinich's draft bill H.R. 6010 states in part, "No one, including the president, may instruct a person acting within the scope of employment with the United States Government or an agent acting on behalf of the United States Government to engage in, or conspire to engage in, the extrajudicial killing of a United States citizen... As Kucinich points out, "The US government cannot act as judge, jury, and executioner."

So the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) along with the CIA seems to be carrying out these “extrajudicial” (outside of the law) assassinations all over the world.

Who or what is JSOC?

The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is a component command of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and is charged to study special operations requirements and techniques to ensure interoperability and equipment standardization, plan and conduct special operations exercises and training, and develop Joint Special Operations Tactics.

In March 2009, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh described JSOC as "a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently... They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office... Congress has no oversight of it.

A few months later, when it was reported that General Stanley McChrystal would be taking over command of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, journalist Gareth Porter noted that McChrystal had been commander of JSOC from April 2003 to August 2008 and commented that his "long specialisation in counter-terrorism operations suggests an officer who is likely to have more interest in targeted killings than in the kind of politically sensitive counterinsurgency programmes that the Obama administration has said it intends to carry out."

So JSOC is the assassination squad for U.S. citizens or other “high value targets” of interest.

But does the United States train others to do assassinations by proxy? In other words, do the dirty work of eliminating leaders, politicians, social movements or others that are in direct conflict with our “national interest” or “sphere of influence."

The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) (formerly known as the School of the Americas (“SOA”), is a United States Department of Defense facility at Ft. Benning, Georgia. This benign sounding “school” or “institute,” established in 1946, has been responsible for training more than 61,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen who have been responsible for some of the most heinous human rights abuses in the 20th century.

From 1946-2001, such infamous dictators (that the U.S. propped up and supported) as Manuel Noriega (Panama) and Augusto Pinochet (Chile) and many others had soldiers and police trained at the SOA. The brutal tactics of “counterinsurgency” taught at the SOA included torture, indefinite detention and extrajudicial killings.

“The U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) used training materials that condoned executions of guerillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion, and false imprisonment" asserts an Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB) Report issued June 28, 1996, in Washington, DC. The IOB, a four-person, independent board created three years ago(1993) by President Clinton, is charged with investigating excesses and abuses by the US intelligence community.

The term “death squads” is closely associated with the training received at the SOA. Many of the countries (Chile, Bolivia, etc.) that formerly sent soldiers for training, now have refused this offer from the United States.

To counter the operations at WHINSEC (the new and “improved” name as of 2001), the “School of Americas Watch" was founded by Mary Knoll Father Roy Bourgeois and a small group of supporters in 1990 to protest the training of mainly Latin American military officers at the School of Americas. Most notably, SOA Watch conducts a vigil each November at the site of the academy, located on the grounds of Fort Benning, a U.S. Army military base near Columbus, Georgia, in protest over myriad human rights abuses committed by graduates of the academy.

So are “extrajudicial” killings (code for assassinations) OK with the American people? Most would most likely answer “NO," but what can you do to stop these abuses by the U.S. government?

A first step is to call or email your congressional representative and insist that they support Rep. Kucinich’s bill (HR 6010) to stop “extrajudicial” killings of U.S. citizens.

Ironically, Abraham Lincoln signed General Order 100 in Section IX entitled “Assassinations” in April 1863 that stated:

The law of war does not allow proclaiming either an individual belonging to the hostile army, or a citizen, or a subject of the hostile government, an outlaw, who may be slain without trial by any captor, any more than the modern law of peace allows such intentional outlawry; on the contrary, it abhors such outrage. The sternest retaliation should follow the murder committed in consequence of such proclamation, made by whatever authority. Civilized nations look with horror upon offers of rewards for the assassination of enemies as relapses into barbarism.

[Jim Turpin is a native Austinite and member of CodePink Austin. He also volunteers for the GI coffeehouse Under the Hood Cafe at Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas.]

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