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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.
Some things are secret for good reason. Very little in what Manning released had any reason to be secret. On the whole, the country is better off having this information public than not.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
Reporting murder of civilians... not O.K.?
Wait, what?!
Some things are secret for good reason. Very little in what Manning released had any reason to be secret. On the whole, the country is better off having this information public than not.
Except, as a private in the US military, that was not Bradley Manning's job or duty to decide. 1 person never has the right to make a decision like that, especially one that had the possibility of costing other people their lives (Notice I said possibility, not did) And there was no way he could have known what was in those thousands of documents. If he did, then he was spending all his time reading them instead of his job, in which case he is still guilty of dereliction of duty. He is already guilty of accessing documents without authorization. These 2 charges alone probably merit forfeiture of pay and rank, as well as several years imprisonment and a dishonorable discharge. And he is probably lucky that he is being tried at court martial. Besides being supplied legal counsel that is an officer (and therefore bound by oath to the law, oath as an officer, and by honor to do the best job they can) and more than likely working solely on this case, a defendant in court martial can also bring in civilian counsel and assistance. Especially in a high profile case like this, his right are probably more protected in a court martial than in a civilian court.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Did anyone else read the Manning/Lamo chat logs? After reading them you get a very different picture of Manning (and Lamo). In my view, Manning was revealed to be a troubled and hurt kid with really strong gender identity issues. He even expressed worry to Lamo that if he was caught, he'd be referred to as "He" instead of "Her". He had anger problems stemming from his confusion and a fight he had that ended in him being demoted (he punched a co-worker). He was definitely not stable and I just don't believe he released this stuff out any desire to serve the "common good". He simply made a grab for as many files as he could get, never actually reviewing them himself.
.mil account, even during the times when Manning was trying to share his worries with him. Clearly Lamo just egged him on, and he probably knew he was going to turn this all over in the end.
If you haven't read them, you might find them informative.
Lamo came across as a selfish user, begging Manning to sponsor him so he can have a
http://http//www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/manning-lamo-logs/
Loose lips also reveal war crimes.
He did violate his oath. And perhaps he should face the death penalty.
But his defiance of criminal acts suppressed through secrecy in spite of the risk also makes him an American patriot and hero.
And the illegal treatment he has received, that as circumvented the lawful process of justice is also a reprehensible failure of the system and an act of treason against the United States of America.
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.
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.
People with clearance do not have the authority to just decide something should be declassified and released publicly regardless of their reason for doing so. It does not matter if you feel the country is better off or not, who knows, it very well may be. It is not up to you or a random PFC to make that determination.
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
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).
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?
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.
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
Except, as a private in the US military, that was not Bradley Manning's job or duty to decide.
Whose duty was it to correctly classify documents? Why are they not being tried for dereliction of duty?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
He believed there was one specific crime, and he actually did expose evidence of it.
Problem is, that was illegal. Releasing every other document in the database was just piling on.
There's a procedure for getting criminally classified documents declassified. In fact, it might not even be necessary, since all he had to do was show certain people within the system that they existed, and the crime would be dealt with without declassifying the documents.
if for some reason he didn't like the result, his recourse was to take it another step up the chain. He's got a dozen commanders and a dozen Inspectors General (who checks-and-balances his associated commander) between him and the Commander-in-Chief, plus he can write his Congressmen (all three of them) or a number of officials in the Defense security apparatus whose sole job is to deal with illegal classification, and he's completely within his rights -- and encouraged -- to do those things, and told (probably on a poster in the classified storage area) that it is illegal for anyone to retaliate against him.
Instead he decided he knew that there were no honest men or women anywhere in that system, so he was above the law, and glory would shine on him for his actions.
I think he had help coming to that belief, and that encouragement constitutes a violation of law itself.
yes they are. and he deserves whatever he gets as a result of that trial. no matter how old he is.
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
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
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
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.
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.
:(){
People in Obama's administration have leaked classified info (bin Laden raid, anyone?)
That info was actually TOP SECRET, and not just SECRET. So someone in Obama's administration is leaking more serious info than Manning did.
Don't hold your breath waiting for that investigation, though.
:(){
> 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.
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.
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.
Except, as a private in the US military, that was not Bradley Manning's job or duty to decide.
It is not his job until his superiors, whose job it is, fail in their duty. Then it is his obligation to do so. Our executive branch has chronically deprived the citizens of the information necessary for us to make informed decisions about how we wish our military to be employed. When those with standard authority are failing in their duty to keep us informed, it is only those without standard authority who can make the decision.
It is a further failure to satisfy their oaths of office that we have ceased to recognize whistleblower protection. The authoritarians have decided that the notion of citizens as sovereigns is far too inconvenient, and that we can't handle the truth.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
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
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.
"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.
"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.