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Bradley Manning's Court Date Finally Set
bs0d3 writes "Bradley Manning has finally been scheduled for a day in court. On December 16, he will have an Article 32 hearing (military pre-trial). Private Manning has been in jail for one and half years. The Article 32 hearing will begin at Fort Meade, Maryland. The primary purpose of the hearing is to evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of the government's case, as well as to provide the defense with an opportunity to obtain pretrial discovery. Further trial dates and locations are still unknown."
The primary purpose of the hearing is to instill fear into anyone else who might have access to sensitive information the public might want to know.
Give his hero ass a medal!
cause being held without due process is full of awesome in this country.
At least the charges against him are real.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
In the U.S a 1.5 year prison sentence is just part of a speedy trial.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Poor fool.... When you sign up you're supposed to understand what you're joining.
End of Line.
And since it's a military trial, he pretty much has to prove not only that he's innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt but further prove who actually did do it. He also has to prove cold fusion using only a pack of gum, a microwave oven, and the complete MacGyver dvd box set.
I'm being facetious, of course, but US military justice isn't famous for its fairness or friendliness to the accused. Just thought people should be aware that he's pretty much screwed whether or not there's any conspiracy to get him convicted.
I shudder to think of a world where "one and a half years" qualifies as "speedy". Or have we forgotten the Bill of Rights?
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
I know the government isn't the swiftest thing in the world, but I don't believe it's that slow. And I'm not sure courts martial qualify as "criminal" prosecutions. But I do know that if I were PFC Manning's lawyer, I'd definitely be bringing that up.
I guess the right to a speedy trial doesn't apply to the military.
I know a lot of people here like to live in a fantasy land where the military doesn't need any secrets, but the fact is that some things are secret for good reason. Troop deployment schedules for instance, can allow the enemy to effectively target less experienced units and kill more Americans.
Manning had this all explained to him when he got his clearance, and assuming that he really is guilty, he deserves what is coming to him. Like it or not, loose lips really do sink ships.
I may have some sympathy if he knew of specific illegal acts and divulged the information about those acts in order to bring about justice.
But that's not what he did. He just released a huge amount of classified information, some of which could get people killed.
You'd have expected the government to get the fix in quicker than 18 months. Wonder why it took so long.
Yes it does. Laws are written around public opinion. Also, there's whistleblower protection. If you are uncovering corruption, rather than giving aid to the enemy, your actions are not criminal. That may well be the case here. The information released was not of a tactical nature. It didn't disclose troop strengths and numbers, positions, weaknesses, or anything like that. Rather, it exposed a bunch of dirty laundry. Information that shouldn't be classified.
Everything can be waived upon request. However, this is the period where the government conducts its investigation. A big, complex case would mean a long investigation.
Here the soldier is at an advantage over a civilian, because he actually gets to be involved in the hearing and present and cross examine witnesses. A civilian prosecutor can (and often does) hold a grand jury without the interests of the defense being presented, thus the saying about indicting a ham sandwich.
This is one reason why courts martial have a high conviction rate. Most cases that wouldn't result in a conviction don't get referred for trial after an Article 32 hearing. This is how our civilian grand jury system is supposed to work.
Manning is just a liar.
When he got is clearance he made an oath knowing what the penalty would be were he to break it, and he broke it.
He released more than 100K classified documents, did he check each one of those documents to see if there was evidence for a specific crime of the US?
I don't think so. He grabbed absolutely everything he could and sent it out.
Contrary to ignorant claims, Manning is no martyr, he's just a lying creep, who should hope that they shoot him rather than lock him away in the USDB forever.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Military laws are different than civilian laws. When you sign up for the military, you agree to be subjected to the Uniform Code of Military Justice when you are on duty or deployed. It is related to US civilian laws, but not the same. So if you want to sign up to be a solider, you need to be aware you are held to a different legal standard. A simple example would be that insubordination is against the law in the military.
Then there's the matter of revealing classified data. Military or not when you are given a security clearance, you agree to not reveal classified information. I don't mean they say "You agree to this," I mean you actually sign an agreement, an NDA. It is very much a full disclosure kind of situation in that you understand and agree not to reveal the things you'll be shown.
So you can certainly say he did the morally right thing leaking the information, if you believe that (though I would then ask you to show what information leaked you believe was so important for the public to know) but you can't argue it was legal or that he didn't know it was illegal. Since it was done in military service, that also makes it a military trial.
About the US of A. Doesn't matter how heavy handed the government acts, there's always a queue forming to defend the actions.
So that video of a bunch of soldiers killing people for no reason was put in the hands of some random 23 year old. He released it, and now they want to charge the 23 year old with "aiding the enemy" which is a capital crime, along with 22 other charges. And they put him in solitary confinement while awaiting trial.
Well at least they are giving him a trial instead of just executing him.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Well, if I were innocent. You don't get a group where the two sides have tried to produce the most ignorant jury possible. They're not likely to be swayed by the pretty charts and rhetoric of the prosecution if they have no real basis.
You get career military people who are generally well-educated and know the military laws themselves. The average officer on the jury is field-grade, and he'll have a military-oriented master's degree at minimum. Enlisted normally don't rise to the ranks that get put on juries without having at least a batchelor's.
The defense generally wants as long as they can before trial for all kinds of reasons. As such you almost never see a speedy trial motion. The only time you'd be likely to see one is if an attorney was convinced his client was innocent and the state was dragging their feat. However that is fairly rare.
Generally in a case where the defense would file a speedy trial motion the prosecution will drop the case rather than go to court and lose. I'm not saying it is always that way, but 99.999% of the time.
In Manning's case his guilt seems to be pretty clear cut. Thus his lawyer is not going to be at all interested in pushing the trial quickly. He'll want as much time to pass as possible for a lot of reasons.
He's had days in court. Administrative matters relating to his basic rights rather than addressing of the larger issues of whether he should or shouldn't be there, but court nonetheless. He hasn't been denied counsel and a judge been in charge of his incarceration and care since shortly after his arrest. The spooks didn't disappear him. He's getting due process (unless maybe someone in the process screws up and he's getting technicalities his lawyer can exploit, but those are details, not a basic denial of any rights beyond his own signing away of anything but military justice).
He is still in the Army and is a prisoner like any other arrested soldier. However, his is a much more severe case than most, and due to the circumstances is held in a status designed to prevent injury by himself or other prisoners.
What were the "atrocities" anyway?
What about committing the supreme international crime, a war of aggression against Iraq?
Is that an "atrocity" enough for you?
let's not forget these leaks were a catalyst for the Tunisian uprising, which lead to the revolts in Egypt and Libya
Since both countries are about to be taken over by hard-core Islamofascist groups (Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt) are you advocating then for a worse punishment?
It's really a shame as I loved Egypt and the people there will great. They were poor but had a lot of freedom really, all of that gone soon...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Enough of that bullshit. Till to date no one has been proven killed because of the cable release. The only thing they have done is cast light on war crimes and other shit the US and their allies pull off. If anything the world is a little bit better knowing that all those conspiracy theories may not be as far fetched as the government would like you to think.
There is only one saving grace in this, in that Assange had the good sense to try to cleanse the documents before releasing them.
That's why it sucks to carry a clearance.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
In the end it seemed like a big bowl of nothing
How about the fact that the DEA -- supposedly a law enforcement agency -- has amassed such vast signals intelligence power that dictators are demanding DEA assistance in spying on political opponents? We knew that the war on drugs was out of control before the leak, but this gives a clear indication of just how out of control things are, and shows us why the government considers the DEA to be a member of the intelligence community. It is also a warning sign, because unlike the CIA, FBI, or NSA, the DEA is allowed to engage in both foreign and domestic operations, including intelligence gathering.
Palm trees and 8
How would this have played out if he had directly leaked the cables to the New York Times instead?
I was watching an episode of Locked Up Abroad and laughing at some 3rd world country that took about a year to put the antagonist to trial while he sat in jail. So, in what version of Gestapo America is 1 1/2 years OK?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
There is so much BS in your post I need a front end loader to get through it. Citations on my website.
1) While the war crime happened in 2006, Assange's cache of cables was only decrypted this summer. So while the news is old so to speak, it is fresh to the public.
2) Obama is a warmonger. For example,
(a) Bush launced 52 drone attacks. Obama has, in a much shorter period, launched 254. You think the GOP twisted his arm to do that?
(b) When Bush left office, there were about 30k troops in Afghanistan. Obama bumped that up to 112k at one point. That was Obama's choice?
(c) Obama is working hard to undermine the Convention on Cluster Munitions even though we aren't even a signatory? You gonna blame that on the GOP?
(d) And then there is Libya. Our founding fathers were well aware of the dangers posed by leaders who could both decide to go to war and then decide how to fight it. They all came from Europe which had suffered greatly under its kings. So they separate the war powers -- Congress got the right to declare it, the President the right to decide how to fight it. Since Korea, this has been ignored and then institutionalized in the War Powers Act. The crime in Libya is that Obama didn't even live up to his duties of the War Powers Act setting a precident that the President can unilaterally declare war. That is fucking huge. And no, his arm wasn't twisted by the GOP, but when future President Cheney arbitrarily attacks Iceland, remember to thank Obama.
3) Recognizing Obama as a neocon warmonger has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with his behavior. Bush was, until Obama embraced and extended his policies, the worst piece of shit this country had had for a president. The fact that Obama is African American however, cannot excuse him for being worse than Bush. Racism is supporting Obama DESPITE everything he has done just because he's not white.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Let's even go back to Private Slovik in WWII, the man famous for being the only one executed for desertion. He said he would desert, was told his action would constitute desertion, and after he did it he was given several chances to go back to his unit and all would be forgotten. He wrote a note incriminating himself, and was offered a couple of times to have it torn up. To make sure Slovik understood the consequences, they had him write on the back of his note.
Slovik committed suicide by judicial system, on the hopes he would just get a jail sentence that would be commuted after the war. A lot of people in the Army system tried, but failed, to protect him from himself.
Well too bad for Manning then he uncovered NOTHING while in the meantime delivering the enemy all kinds of juicy intelligence
You've got your blinkers on there.
Let me guess, your a jingoist?
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
*For extremely slow values of speedy.
Well too bad for Manning then he uncovered NOTHING
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/world/26wikidrugs.html?pagewanted=all
Palm trees and 8
Some people would say that much of the information he released shouldn't have been classified in the first place. So, who is really the one misusing it?
If found guilty, putting him up against the wall and doing what you do to traitors up against the wall is fully appropriate for the damage he has done.
Citation needed.
Palm trees and 8
Having sat in jail a long time might be useful as a bargaining chip, depending on why he said in jail for that long. But if the prosecutors are willing to take a plea bargain, I see two things he might want to consider doing: (a) Decide that what he did was right and fight to the death, or (b) decide that he's willing to admit guilt (even if he still feels he's not guilty) and plea-bargain for time-served and a dishonorable discharge. Of course, neither may work. He's up for treason, which is a serious accusation. But if the government wants to make an example of this behavior without keeping him in prison forever, they can get their legal precedent, which is often what they want. "Making law" is a feather in their caps.
Not even fucking close.
If he could have attached each one of those documents to a specific crime, he might have had some moral ground to stand on. But instead he released as many classified documents as he could get his hands on.
In spite of his self-righteous grandstanding, I think he was really just pissed that he was demoted and going to get kicked out for assaulting an officer and thought, and probably still thinks, that he'll get away with it in the long run.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Here's something that will spin your brain: This is Bush's drawdown. Yep, agreed to in 2008 with the government of Iraq.
The only possible way this had anything to do with the drawdown would be if Obama had been planning to keep the troops there despite the Bush agreement, but decided not to after this got out.
What were the "atrocities" anyway? In the end it seemed like a big bowl of nothing,
How about various bullshit, lies, and war crimes. I'd point to some specifics but it's so widespread that it's a systematic problem and I don't know where to begin.
But hell, off the top of my head, we were lied to about the state of affairs in Afghanistan, it was a lot worse then reported. We killed a lot more civilians in Iraq then they let on. A US contractor, Dyncorp, that trained cops in Afghanistan paid for child prostitution to said cops. Monsanto is an evil corporation that politically retaliates against business opposition. McDonald's uses political pressure to evade lawsuits abroad. The state department used diplomats to spy on the Ban Ki-Moon, the secretary general of the UN (which is kind of their job, until they're asked to get DNA, fingerprints, passwords, and encryption keys).
Would you people please READ instead of using talking points?
US troops committed summary execution of Iraqi women and children, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence.
DynCorp pimped young boys to Afghani police recruits ("bacha bazi").
If that's a "big bowl of nothing", then I'd like a helping of "bullshit" to go with it.
:(){
Thank you for pointing out what should be fucking obvious. Everyone just looks the other way while stuff is being improperly classified, as if that doesn't matter at all. Perhaps if they had not wrongly classified that intel, Manning wouldn't have had the urge to allegedly leak it.
:(){
You mean that war that was agreed to in a landslide congressional vote? Yes, its TOTALLY our military's fault for following the Commander in Chief's orders which were grounded on a Congressional declaration of war.
> He leaked that information and is fully responsible for what happens as a result.
I agree. This is the basis on which he should be judged. Did the release of this information on balance have a good or bad effect. He couldn't possibly have known the implications of all releasing all that he released, some informers could have conceivable ended up being executed (although, I'm pretty sure the powerful interests embarrassed by the leak would have highlighted any concrete examples had there been any). On the other hand, a vast amount of this information was not classified for any reason other than for political expediency. One cannot have a functioning democracy when people have no idea what their government is up to so there is a definite good that comes from bringing more information to light than the government is comfortable with. Its also true that diplomats cannot properly function without discretion. Tricky one this.. he's guilty, he'll go to jail, but he was right about something: a vast amount of this stuff was classified for the benefit of other guilty parties rather than for the good of the American people. He gets to pay the price of our increased liberty - he can't be let off completely but some compassion is called for
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
According to Wired Magazine, "WikiLeaks may have just bolstered one of the Bush administration’s most controversial claims about the Iraq war: that Iran supplied many of the Iraq insurgency’s deadliest weapons and worked hand-in-glove with some of its most lethal militias. The documents indicate that Iran was a major combatant in the Iraq war, as its elite Quds Force trained Iraqi Shiite insurgents and imported deadly weapons like the shape-charged explosively formed penetrator bombs into Iraq for use against civilians, Sunni militants and U.S. troops."[
Thats damning stuff right there.
Seriously, did you even read that list? The first 10 or so talk either about interesting statistics that may have been misreported, and several issues of the Iraqi security forces. The worst you can really pin on our military (at least from the first several bullets there) is that we classified the reuters reporters killed in the gunship incident as enemy combatants.
People still havent answered this:
Even if we were to assume your statements were 100% accurate, it STILL doesnt answer the question, "why release the other 99,000 documents?"
demands blood, for socialist... i mean capitalist legality! ... i mean JAG
truly the fascist.. i mean terrorist ally manning must feel the wrath of SMERSH
information. there are certain types of classified information that are a crime in certain situations, and none of them apply to manning.
you can go read the actual laws, starting with the Espionage Act, which doesnt even use the word 'classified' until you get to the SIGINT part (and he isnt charged with the SIGINT part)
then you can read the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is an embarassement, but also doesnt use the word 'classified'.
if you want to know WHY there is no law, its because most congressmen and presidents leak classified information all the time, every news story you have ever read or book containing words like 'senior officials tell us' and so forth and so on is someone leaking classified information for a political purpose.
so your entire argument is basically moot.
read the actual text of the laws he is accused of violating. "having classified info on a non classified system" whats the penalty for that? it sure as hell aint the death penalty or a life sentence.
Point of fact: Germany declared war on the US first. That allowed the US to legally respond in kind and undertake overt hostilities.
With the attack on Pearl Harbor, the US's full entry into the war went from an eventual likelihood to a guarantee.
I agree with you on the invasion of Iraq and the apprehension of Saddam Hussein. I disagree that Afghanistan should be vacated right now, as it's still not nearly stable enough and we'd just end up back there sooner or later.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
No war was ever declared against Iraq. The only times war has been declared by the US were the War of 1812; the Mexican-American War; the Spanish-American War; and both World Wars. Iraq was a congressionally-authorized military action. There's a significant legal difference.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The war was a lie. The President and Cheney declared that Iraq had attacked us. We went there and slaughtered 60K+ people outright, destroyed their electrical generator plants, water systems, gas lines, highways and outright stole their only national resource, the oil under their feet. We did it against the advice of almost every country on earth. We've led to the deaths and torture of almost two million people. We've emptied the country of its people as they fled a 120+ degree hell that now has no jobs, no air conditioning, barely food, and has a government consisting of the son of a bitch, Chalabi, who told Bush and Cheney anything they wanted to hear. He is now in charge of the oil fields and is essentially the secret service. We have installed another bunch of thieves, and you want to "bring our boys home", like they just fought Adolph. That country could not, would not, did not want to attack us. but it had lovely oil, and we stole it.
Am I the only person in the world who thinks Bradley Manning is a fictitious character? I kinda think he doesn't exist and I'm curious as to the source of these news.
1) Manning DID NOT release the documents, as you keep asserting. He transmitted them to Wikileaks, a trusted organization that kept secret whistleblowers secret.
2) Wikileaks DID NOT RELEASE a blessed thing; the New York Times, the Guardian of London, and two other papers were given the block of documents, and they and they *alone* released what they thought safe to release after careful review, in which Wikileaks did not participate. If you have a problem, take it up with the newspapers, not Manning, not Wikileaks.
3) The full documents got out after a reporter from the Guardian, I believe, idiotically published the password in an article. Go hang him.
4) Manning and Wikileaks exercise due diligence and made sure that they released nothing harmful to the troops by giving control of the release to responsible reporters who were supposed to know what they are doing. That is precisely how responsible leakers have always done it.
5) The reporters let us see that our troops had committed a savage murder, on camera, and the chain of command had refused to investigate.
6) Large number of stories are now known to us about immoral and illegal acts committed by our government and others. One of those reports triggered the uprising called the Arab Spring. Perhaps you've heard of it.
7) The US government in the past ten years has extended secret classifications to even mundane domestic reports. We even have secret laws that we cannot see, and no-fly lists that cannot be seen or contested. We have a country run in secret down to our police departments. A country that does not know, CANnot know, by law, what is actually happening in their name cannot possess the knowledge to govern themselves, making democracy itself impossible, even illegal. To become informed is to break the law. To break this blockade on truth is to spend 18 months in solitary without charge while they try to get you to falsely implicate others. To try to keep your country free and murderers tried for their crimes, they will lock you up for years without charges and then give you two weeks to get ready for trial after your mind is half gone and you haven't talked to a sane human for so long you can't construct sentences, let alone argue, against the full might of a national secrecy state that likes power and ain't about to give any up to lippy men with notions of right and wrong.
This is not about oaths and laws. This is about what is right, and what is wrong. And knowing enough to understand the different.
unity10, you must be gay.
You want my balls?.
Check your wife's mouth for me.
How did my dick taste after you came back from ATLANTA and kissed your wife for the first time in weeks?
ATLANTA HAHAHAHAHAAH ATLANTA !!! HAHAHAHAAHAA
.... did someone screw you in atlanta, KID ? HAHAHAHAAHHA
fucking atlanta. not austin or seattle. atlanta
it seems we need coppa act back. too many 12 year olders flying about on the internet.
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What makes this case so interesting is that he clearly broke the military rules and also clearly helped humanity through his actions and he never gained anything by doing it. He wasn't paid for doing it and he knew people would hate him and that he would be punished hard but he followed his ideals rather than doing what gains him the most personally. He believed in the right of the public to know what their country is actually doing and where their tax money goes.
I see that some of you are angry with him and want him punished but when asked what he actually did wrong you can't argue further than him "breaking the rules" and "acting irresponsible". That he caused or will cause deaths is pure speculation. Maybe you are angry with him because deep inside you know you would never have the balls to pull this off by yourself? Because you know that you are that kind of person that curls into a ball when the authority beats you with a stick and tells you what to do and think. Because being told what to do and think follows naturally when you argue that the government has the right to censor and keep information secret from the public it serves.
What makes this case so interesting is the reactions from people. It tells you a lot of what kind of person you are deep inside.
2A) The NY Times and the London Guardian informed the US government, before publishing anything, that they were in possession of the documents. They invited the US to review what was to be published, and were given the power to edit the documents so that no soldier would be endangered by publication. The US government refused to cooperate. So, please, keep this in mind when you talk about Manning "releasing" documents. All the T's were crossed and the i's dotted.
Even if we were to assume your statements were 100% accurate, it STILL doesnt answer the question, "why release the other 99,000 documents?"
For the same reason why the other 4000 pages of the Pentagon Papers were released, I would imagine.
However, I think that you might be asking this question about the wrong person. A leaker/whistleblower is often not the best person to sift through the material that they have at their disposal and decide what is in the public interest to release and what isn't. That's the job of journalists.
For what it's worth, Manning isn't accused of releasing anything to the general public. He's accused of releasing material to a press agency (in this case Wikileaks). You should be asking the press why the other documents were released, not Manning (even assuming it was him who did it).
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Wow it must be nice living on the kinds of drugs you must taking to now to see that transmitting to a non authorized entity is RELEASING documents. It is not a matter of being trusted, I am sure lots of people trusted the KGB 50 years ago too, that did not make them authorized to view hundreds of thousands of cables, and getting caught transmitting to them would have almost certainly found you put on trial for treason.
Oil prices remaining high doesn't mean we didn't do it for "our" sake. It just means that you are not one of the "our."
The simple fact of the matter is: Bradley Manning is more of a patriot than you or I or probably anyone else on Slashdot could ever hope to be.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
The Arab Spring revolutions are over. Does Libya or Egypt now have a free and democratic government?
1) Manning DID NOT release the documents, as you keep asserting. He transmitted them to Wikileaks, a trusted organization that kept secret whistleblowers secret.
Yea, see, that right there is releasing sensitive information. He is the one who had the original access to it, and he is the source of the leak. You might as well claim that, had he put it on bittorrent, it wasnt HIS fault that it was broken up into a zillion pieces and spread all over the internet.
If you have a problem, take it up with the newspapers, not Manning, not Wikileaks.
The newspapers arent being charged, last I checked, since they didnt break any agreements or violate any military codes.
Manning and Wikileaks exercise due diligence and made sure that they released nothing harmful to the troops by giving control of the release to responsible reporters who were supposed to know what they are doing. That is precisely how responsible leakers have always done it.
That might have held some water if he hadnt realeased such an incredible amount of stuff which amounted to basically however much he could get his hands on.
This is not about oaths and laws.
See, thats where youre wrong-- laws and oaths are precisely why Manning is on trial, and would have been at any point in US history. What he did has never been acceptable, and never will be. As for right and wrong, for him to take the moral high ground he would have had to exercise a great deal more restraint and specificity on what he leaked than he did.
Fair enough, but at the end of the day it amounted to the same thing, sans martial law / habeus corpus.
just posting to this so I can find it again later easily. Brilliant post.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Really? he revealed 250K documents of war-crimes?
Or was he just pissed because he was getting kicked out for assaulting an officer and is playing the sympathy card in the hopes they he can give the govt. a bloody nose and eventually get away with it?
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
So... somewhere it's written down that when you do this you don't go to trial but you spend more than a year in a very inhumane pre-trial lockup? Ah, ok, I see.
When I first heard about Manning being arrested I thought; Damn! How dare they arrest a man who exposed the dirty secrets of a nation.
But as I thought about it, he didn't seem to focus on any particular issue. The Cables were all manner of things, some not even remotely interesting. And this is why I'm not all for believing this man acted in the best interests exposing the dirty laundry. If he had found an actual document(s) that told of some horrible atrocity and exposed the lies behind that, I would have the utmost respect for the man. But I just see a guy who grabbed a fistful of Cables and sent them to WikiLeaks.
Well Nazist military who conspired against Hitler were indeed executed for treason. They infringed the law and their oath. But are heroes nonetheless. Sometimes infringing the law is the only right thing to do.
Over?
Are you completely ignorant to what is happening right now in Tahrir square in Cairo?
Eat the rich.
"As for right and wrong, for him to take the moral high ground he would have had to exercise a great deal more restraint and specificity on what he leaked than he did."
This is retarded, there's no possible way he could've filtered through the information to separate the countless amounts of abuse documented within, so your argument is effectively that because he couldn't do this he shouldn't have leaked at all to avoid the more menial and irrelevant cables getting leaked.
Your argument amounts to saying that if you can't separate all the evidence of an endemic attitude of turning a blind eye to breaches of various international standards on human rights, diplomatic laws, war crimes and so forth from the mundane then you should just keep it all secret.
The story from the cables wasn't one specific incident or another, it's that the US was ignoring the very standards it preaches to the rest of the world and from the very top to the very bottom illustrated by everything from Hilary Clinton ordering the spying on of UN diplomats in international territory down to grunts on the ground murdering people and shelling civilian populated areas in the hope of randomly hitting militants.
Sure not all of it was relevant to this story, but you just couldn't filter out the irrelevant cruft.
Finally you're missing the GP's point completely, yes we all know that technically it's about breaking some arbitrarily (and often undemocratically) defined legal principle, but the GP's point was that just because something is law, doesn't mean it's just, doesn't mean it's moral, and doesn't mean it's right. Thus far for all the talk of putting lives in danger the leaks have not done so, they have led to a massive positive upheaval in global politics where the entrenched positions of vested interests were the very things that led to the complacency that allowed the abuses highlighted within the cables to be committed in the first place. The net effect of the leaks has been overwhelmingly positive across the globe and in the court of moral judgement Manning has been vindicated, it's just a shame the courts of American justice no longer align with what is right, or what is wrong, only with what the vested interests from large corporates to self interested politicians want to be the case. Really, the only people bitching about what Manning did are wrong are for the most part, the same right wing Republican types who allowed the likes of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to turn into a such a shit storm in the first place, so no, the rest of the world doesn't give a fuck what you think, we just feel sorry for Manning being caught up in your poisonous grasp but thank him for the positive effect his actions have had in the world.
You dont have the guts to say whats on your mind (do you mean shoot him?) and you still cant see how important free speech is...
OPEN YOUR EYES
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu. angry 12 year old. angry much ?
Read radical news here
It is a waste to keep such an young educated man in a cell.
The effect is irrelevant. You are arguing "two wrongs make a right". He committed crimes and should be punished for those crimes.
Under your theory, I should be allowed to go around killing drug dealers without fear of prosecution because the net effect would be positive.
Oh, and you are also using a false dichotomy because, even without the release of the documents in question, the people did have an idea what their government was up to. These documents didn't mean the difference between the people knowing and having "no idea".
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
No, he was not a patriot. You don't seem to know what that word means. Perhaps you should look it up. Here, let me help you with that
A person who vigorously supports their country and is prepared to defend it against enemies or detractors
Now, let us look at the definition of another word, traitor:
1. a person who betrays another, a cause, or any trust.
2. a person who commits treason by betraying his or her country.
According to the dictionary, Manning is a traitor.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Where have you been?
You're both wrong. Bradley Manning is, like all humans, a complex mixture of a half a dozeon or more motivations, some altruistic, some self-serving, some fearful. His motives included retribution because he was getting kicked out under an unjust law (don't ask, don't tell) and patriotism because he felt that something should be done about a wartime atrocity and apparently out of some sense of admiration for anarchy.
He's a fool who committed a possibly traitorous act partly for revenge and partly for patriotism. I'm glad he's getting his day in court, and and I wish it had been a lot sooner. I hope all of his motivations are laid bare in court for a judge to decide what's to be done.
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Get an email with a classified sentence in it, forward it with your long unclassified comments, forget to label your specific comments as unclassified, ta-da, over-classification.
Individual paragraphs are supposed to be labeled by their classification, and individual pages are supposed to be labeled with the highest-classified paragraph, and documents labeled with the highest-classified page. But this isn't always done because people are lazy, or maybe their training wasn't good enough. Now when there's a FOIA request the person working it can't simply look at the classification indicators and allow the paragraph to be released, it has to be declassified. That can take much time and effort, and it's safer just to consider it classified.
Basically, well-meaning people err on the side of caution.
The anonymous coward is calling the person who logged in to disagree with him a sock puppet.
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To disobey what he thinks is an unlawful order, it had better be blatantly unlawful on its face. One such order could be "Burn these thousands of classified documents onto a CD and give them to a foreign leak-publishing site." That is blatantly unlawful, and a soldier could probably get away with refusing to do it.
I knew a female military prison guard who was ordered to leave the female prisoners under her watch and report somewhere, and the male guard ordering her was to take over watch of the prisoners. Having female prisoners guarded solely by a male guard was explicitly against the written rules, so she refused to leave her post until relieved by a female guard. Even in such a clear-cut case she was in a heap of trouble until it went to the top and she was cleared.
So "I don't believe in the general mission here" is not going to cover a soldier's ass for disobeying orders.
To WikiLeaks. That is why he's in so much legal trouble.
He's innocent before proven guilty.
But instead he's been treated worse than a criminal from day one.
Child prostitution isn't damning?
He showed the military holes in their systems and procedures:
Don't just throw files out there even if they are on SIPR. Use normal directory and share security to keep things in your section unless you intend to share them.
Lock out CD burning and USB drive mounting.
If a soldier looks unstable, consider pulling his access. If he's going to be kicked out, it should be SOP to pull his access before you even tell him.
Except that habeas corpus has only been suspended in a declared war during World War II, and then only for the territory of Hawaii. Habeas corpus has been suspended outside of a declared war only a few times, most notably the Civil War and in the Phillipines when it was a US territory. Martial law has been declared more often, but with the exception of the Civil War and the aforementioned situation in Hawaii, it has generally been limited in the scope to a city or a few counties.
The way the US practices war is a little different from how nations on other continents have practiced it, in large part because the US has had few hostile immediate neighbors, and even when it did, its existence was in comparatively little danger.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The way you assert it to be, it may very well be in practice, and it may very well have been upheld by the courts. But the courts have upheld a lot of laws for a long time before they were overturned, and no law, military or civil, is special in this regard.
But more than that, the situation with Bradley Manning is also clearly wrong. The requirement to obey lawful orders goes hand-in-hand with the responsibility to only give lawful orders, and that carries all the way up to the top: the commander-in-chief (i.e. the president).
Where does his authority come from? The constitution! He also swears to uphold it, and he literally has no authority to command anyone to disregard it, in whole or in part.
Or else, if the US really is about fetishizing military discipline to such a crazy extent, then fuck it. But I don't think so.
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
"He released tens (hundreds?) of thousands of documents for basically one or two issues that might have been significant."
Therein lies precisely the problem with people like you who feel the US is a nation who's evidence of wrongdoing should be kept secret, you just fob it off as "one or two issues" when there were, frankly, 100s of important issues all surrounding the same theme - American arrogance as a source of many problems in the world, from diplomatic spying to many many counts of killing of civilians.
If a company suffers from systemic corruption and incompetence then yes, only a complete leak of their data will be enough to allow people to examine the depth of the problem. This is the fundamental issue unveiled by the cables Manning leaked - American corruption and incompetence was a major problem throughout pretty much every level of the military and government, and that needed to be exposed so that America can correct it's path of self-destruction based upon arrogance and the culture of secrecy that allowed such corruption and subversive practices to thrive in the first place.
I don't expect you to understand this though, as first you would have to recognise that America has lost it's way as a force for good in the world, but I'll help you get started on that - extraordinary rendition and detention without trial and Guantanamo are an ideal start. You can follow up with the war in Iraq and exactly what that was meant to achieve and who profited from it (Hint: Bush and Cheney et al.) at the expense of many US service people's lives. When you start to recognise that America has lost it's way, you'll begin to understand why America has seen it's respect in the world plummet, and when you understand all of that you'll begin to recognise that America needs the kind of shake up Manning has provided to wake up from it's mindless sleepwalk towards it's own downfall.
Perhaps you'll also then realise that people like me don't like seeing things like the Wikileaks leak happen because we hate America, but because we would rather see America return to being a force for good in the world - something it inherently can't ever be when the widespread practices exposed by the cables continue to be commonplace. The best defence against such a leak in future is the same solution required for America to return to being an important force for good in the world - stop merely pretending to be a beacon of democracy, liberty, justice, and freedom and actually start once again to act in the interests of those tenets. If America was doing that, there'd be nothing of note worth leaking.
Yes, the press would do anything that will sell papers. On the other hand, the government would do anything that will get votes or cover their rears. One of the hardest lessons of the post-9/11 era, for those who hadn't learned it earlier, is that there is no such thing as "the good guys".
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The reason the troops didn't come home right away is that the country needed help becoming stable again. If we had immediately left, it would have guaranteed another dictator rising to power.
Another problem is that it seems people in power on our side keep making the same mistakes in that region because they don't understand it. The things being fought over are the differences between Shia and Sunni. It is roughly equivalent to the old fights between Catholic and Protestant, and it is a very difficult problem to solve.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?