Of course, it is a matter of fact whoever has sworn an oath to the Washington regime can be legitimately killed, because the anachronistic empire has mandated that by its own deeds. This is not some weird Islamic puritanism but independent from local customs or hegemonic ambitions, due to the universal appliance of the law of cause and consequence. That it is in fact so can be seen from the situation that, without taking this important detail into consideration, there is no consistent explanation of current events. The world has actually degenerated to a stage where it is not possible to find truth in any other explanation what is going on than in the anachronism of the dying empire. This is incredibly sad, because the human impulse tends to avoid it, but it can be changed. And the idea that this was a cruel statement to make is less overwhelming with every assassination attempt by the empire one has survived, and be it only because it wants some of these it threatens with death to remain alive for a while, or more precisely it wants to determine your time of death according to its own purposes. Killing loyalists of the Washington regime is like opening the gates of hell for the innocent to get out.

But a renegade of the empire, who has seen the light and can plausibly argue not to have known any better before, still is more of a matter of compassion than of solidarity than e. g. Mumia Abu Jamal, who is accused of having killed a cop he obviously has not though would have been justified to in the situation if he had. This is not only due to the predictable smear propaganda fabricated to distract from the scientific meaning of Bradley Manning´s discovery that there is a self-evident immunity of dissent that is the foundation of all freedom and has the weight of an absolute moral imperative. On the surface this is the echo of the depiction of Nazi child soldiers, which can be found in the strange combination of abused faces and uniforms that have more resemblance to some crazy school uniform than to any practical gear, because they signify the sick militarism of their bearers in a largely self-referential ideology.

That phenomenon has been researched and its sociology is well known, but apparently neither to Manning nor his former employers, which makes it a double blind experiment in scientific terms. What antifascist observers can see in the Manning case is a kind of Goldhagen Experiment that combines the arrangement of the notorious "Milgram experiment" with the Goldhagen theory on the Totenkopf SS battalions in the Holocaust. And the result is that one of the participants, without prior notification, found that there are values which prohibit the entire system that is responsible for the fact that most evil in history is committed by law-abiding citizens imagining it to be perfectly normal to serve the regimes that empower them to it. In case Manning survives that system, research might benefit from his account.

Like with Mumia Abu Jamal, it makes no practical difference whether the so-called court of the imperialist apparatus chooses to kill Manning immediately or let him rot in their imprisonment system and kill him later. The experience with the Nazis is that these temporarily pardoned from immediate death to imprisonment were killed as soon as the system saw its own end coming and feared it might be survived by them. In the case of Mumia Abu Jamal, there was not even explanation provided why the official decision changed from quick death to slow death, and it is suspected that any such change in the other direction would also come without reasoning if the tide is turning.

The empire might conclude that the goal of scaring its servants is better achieved with a renegade on some kind of death row than with one in a casket. This again is not just an historical experience but a current event, with an assassination campaign that has more resemblance to death row than to man hunting, embodied in the case of Osama Bin Laden, where all propaganda was unsuccessful to hide that the assassination was not the result of a search for the person but had been in the pipeline for a while. Then the disinformation was proliferated that there was no intention to kill Edward Snowden, but it should be a show-piece to consider what would be happening in the case it was able to get at him, and its apologists then said something changed their minds. The value of statements from the empire that are not leaks with an independent intention behind them is zero or even below.

It claims the trial was about spying, but is unable to say which enemy Manning allegedly has worked for, obviously because he did not. Enemies of the anachronistic empire had the pleasure to find the material in public. If that court was anything else than a sick joke made of evil imposters, it would have to declare its own inoperability, since the spying is going on in the audience, and how could anyone build a case against spying while continuing to be spied against? The spies would take the emerging case and twist it into nonsense before it can even come close to stop them. In a courtroom where it is not even possible to build a rape case, because before it fully emerges an army of evil imposters is mobbing the speaker to seize the issue for whitewashing themselves, there is little choice between being its useful idiot or its declared enemy.

In that courtroom, Manning is a plaintiff and a witness, having run away from that army and being able to testify on its denied intentions - e. g. to assassinate Snowden. But in the echo chamber of imperialist delusion and demise, Manning appears to be the evildoer who is said to have desecrated the intentions of the Washington regime - which is of course nonsense, since no private data was contained in the leaks, only such concerning the imperialist apparatus. The just as true as simple explanation why there is no justice for Manning is that before the spying is ended there is no justice for anyone. And ending the spying does require, although this alone is not yet sufficient, killing the spies. And, that is why the Manning case is such an important precedent, anyone who remains stuck on collaboration with them.