Julian Assange and Bradley Manning: Liberal Hypocrisy On Rape And Torture

Whenever I hear liberals talk about Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, I’m reminded of a particular Ann Coulter quote,

We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors.

Liberals tend to get terribly offended by this quote, but the fact of the matter is that there’s a lot of truth in it. If your goal is to hurt America, on some instinctive level, liberals tend to root for you.

You can see this attitude on display in the Julian Assange/Bradley Manning case.

Michael Moore not only chipped in $20,000 for Assange’s bail, he’s blowing off rape charges because they’re aimed at a new liberal hero. Because liberals are deliberately misreporting the charges, you may not even know that Assange is actually accused of “rape rape,” as Whoopi Goldberg might put it,

The latest dude to misrepresent the Julian Assange rape allegations in front of a national audience is Michael Moore, who last night told a sympathetic Keith Olbermann it’s a bunch of “hooey” over a broken condom.

At this point, the Assange case involves more misinformation about condoms than an abstinence-only sex ed class. Here’s Moore – who helped post bail for Assange – telling Olbermann the accusations are “hooey” and claiming Assange was arrested because “a condom broke”:

Actually, (as we’ve already said) the British extradition hearings make it clear that Assange is accused of such crimes as holding a woman down during sex, and having nonconsensual, unprotected sex with a woman while she was sleeping.

A few liberal women are quite understandably upset about the attitude that most of the Left has taken — and you’d be particularly upset if you were them, too. Imagine learning, after the Polanski case and this one, that most of your fellow liberals will side with a man who rapes you if he happens to be a popular Leftist. It’s even worse from the perspective of a liberal woman in politics than for the average women because she has a much higher chance of running into someone like that at a party.

Then there’s Bradley Manning. If he’s is guilty of giving classified information to Julian Assange, he should be hung by the neck until he’s dead. That’s what traitors to our country deserve. Of course, liberals don’t see it that way. Manning’s actually a hero or something, ya know, like the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss.

Speaking of Bradley Manning, Glenn Greenwald has written a high profile piece about him. Greenwald, who’s actually a pretty awful writer (He’s so long winded, silly, and tedious), is all upset (What else is new?)! It seems that poor, poor Bradley Manning is being — and I kid you not — “tortured.”

Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months — and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait — under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning’s detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.

Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems. He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a “Maximum Custody Detainee,” the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day — for seven straight months and counting — he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he’s barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions.

Greenwald goes on and on and on and on and on from there, because he can’t ever say anything in 500 words that he could say in 2500 words instead — but that’s the gist of it.

Now personally, I don’t have any problem with Manning being a “Maximum Custody Detainee.” If he’s done what he’s being accused of doing, he deserves to spend the rest of his life in solitary right up until he’s put to death. A lot of other liberal blogs have jumped on the Manning story and of course, they agree with Greenwald, not me. No surprise there.

That being said, know what really stood out for me through all the posts I read about Manning on liberal blogs? It wasn’t what they wrote so much as what they DIDN’T WRITE. When liberals accused American troops of torturing detainees, they held George Bush and Dick Cheney PERSONALLY responsible. They thought it merited their impeachment or worse yet, a trial for war crimes. Now, there may be posts out there that I didn’t notice; that’s certainly possible, but after reading more than half a dozen liberal blogs covering this story, I didn’t notice a single one that blamed Barack Obama for the conditions Manning is being held in. I didn’t see any of them suggesting that Obama should be pressured to do anything about it either. But, if Manning is being “tortured” by being put in solitary confinement (eye roll), then what makes Obama any different than the Bush Administration officials who supported waterboarding, which the Left has falsely labeled torture as well? Nothing.

Hypocrites.

PS: If Osama Bin Laden is ever arrested and somehow becomes eligible to get out on bail, I think he can probably count on Michael Moore chipping in a few bucks to help out.

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