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Bradley Manning Offers Partial Guilty Plea To Military Court
concealment writes "During a pre-trial hearing in military court today, [alleged Wikileaks source Bradley] Manning's attorney, David Coombs, proposed a partial guilty plea covering a subset of the slew of criminal charges that the U.S. Army has lodged against him. "Manning is attempting to accept responsibility for offenses that are encapsulated within, or are a subset of, the charged offenses," Coombs wrote on his blog this evening. "The court will consider whether this is a permissible plea.""
him finally coming out how he started WO2 and the Spanish inquisition? By the way they have treated him I am sure he is ready to confess those too.
All the hardcore authoritarian fascists want him dead, I wonder if they'll get their wish. If so, I wonder if Adrian Lamo will feel any guilt at all for ending this guy's life for no fucking reason (attention? "Remember me? I'm still around, everyone!")
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You know, the ones who approved of the illegal activities by the military personal who Manning *PROPERLY* released information about?
When will we see them hang for their offenses?
I'll have one bowl of split plea soup to go.........eh!
It's a shame how this country treats our war heroes.
Did Bradley Manning steal a whole bunch of military and government secrets and leak them? Yes: he's guilty.
Did Julian Assange then publish these secrets, knowing that he has zero way of predicting the consequences? Yes: he's guilty.
I know these are unpopular views.
However, for a society to work, we need to have rules. Just like it's bad logic to say, "I'm bigger than you, therefore I'm going to take your stuff," it's bad logic to say, "I know how to steal and publish these secrets, so I will."
I don't see any of Julian Assange's defenders stepping up to dox themselves on the internet, and reveal some of the stuff they've had on their hard drives over the years.
Hmm... what's in this folder labeled 'Windows CABs'? Looks like a bunch of pictures. Click. Wait a second... is that a goat?
Justifying this leak because we think all governments are bad is a foolish way of thinking. We don't know what government does and a lot of it we'd rather not know. Just get good people into office, make sure there are others in the system who can observe what they do, and we'll get the best results.
Trying to monitor our whole government by making it 'transparent' is going to result in a government that will be totally adversarial to us and will hide a lot of secrets. Those will be in places without any oversight. Think about this one.
I don't think Wikileaks solved a single problem, or advanced us at all. Most likely, it got some people killed for doing what they believed was right. It's time for Assange and Manning to face the consequences of their actions.
Maybe you should go out and come back in again?
Then frustrate their wishes by forcing him and Assange to stand trial instead. There's no death penalty for this offense, and that way he gets to present his side in court.
If I found wrongdoing in the military, I'd get out of service and then use the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to get the information I needed. That way, it would be publicly released and either reveal what was going on, or what the government was covering up.
Quite frankly he's served more then enough time for whatever crime he committed.
Also, considering how many illegal things he uncovered, shouldn't he be covered by whistleblower protection?, or did everybody just forget about those?
Do you work within government? That's generally the accepted way.
If you know, you're complicit in approving this stuff, most of which goes on in morally murky areas.
Espionage, counter-terrorism, military strategy and other areas contain a lot of stuff that must necessarily be secret.
Do you want to be responsible for knowing where all the nukes are? Didn't think so.
Guess I didn't "speak for myself (only)" after all.
If that's the case, it implies a secret being kept.
If no one cares about that, then no one cares that a secret is being kept.
This is the situation we have now: most of us are fully aware that our government keeps secrets, and has to do some bad stuff to keep up with the bad guys. (Think of some of the nasty stuff we did during the Cold War, for example.)
It seems that only a few of you want government to publish all of its secrets, and you seem to have no reason why except for some mythology that you'll monitor it all.
Are you monitoring it now?
Exactly.
They didn't go looking for evidence.
They released a ton of information, and then looked back through it to find a justification for releasing it.
Now you're just waffling.
What evidence exists to suggest this stuff would have been buried 25 years from its creation?
None.
But, but, but...according to the US Government electronic documents aren't property, so all that he's done is breach copyright - and of course material produced by US federal agencies (like the military) is free of copyright, so he didn't even do that. Better just execute him anyway, though, it's the American way.
is that they are not going to execute that little treasonous fuck stick.
I'm assuming sarcasm.
I don't think systems self-police well.
I think having good people in those systems means that those people make correct moral choices.
The court will consider whether this is a permissible plea.
the court will consider whether this prostration suits the requirement of its mission objectives to enact justice in such a fashion as to maintain the narrative of a freedom seeking patriotic democratic nation whos foreign interests are peaceful and to the benefit of all mankind.
The fact that manning even has to consider a guilty plea is evidence that innocent human life has less inherent value in the eyes of the government than the actions of an american soldier in a war on terror with no purpose and no end.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Your idea is broken on a technical level.
In your view, every citizen reads through everything that its government does and polices it.
That's going to create a huge bottleneck for each person; it's too much.
The other way to do this is to get people who are of superior ability and character into these roles so that they will do what is right.
Every day you delegate trust to millions of people. You're trusting them not to crash into you, not to poison your food by letting it sit out overnight, not to leave a gas valve open in the smoking area, etc.
You're going to have to delegate this too from a sheer information overload.
Further, I don't see the citizens self-policing... starting with themselves. Most people seem to be in the process of getting their act together. I'm not sure I see this civilian force as capable of keeping its lawns mowed, much less overseeing government.
I'd prefer to have people of superior character and ability in government taking care of these complex problems, because I don't think the average person can.
I think our government gave the leakers a pass during Watergate because that was perceived as a gross violation of the purpose of government. Not so in this case. What do you object to about how it has been handled?
I hope President Obama last actions when he leaves office of the presidency is to grant Peter Manning a presidential pardon, after all he is a Political Prisoner for disclosing disgracefully actions of our U.S. Military, however he also deserves to be punish, but for the rest of his life hell no. It just go to show that you piss off powerful people, they will find a way to fuck your life over.
Because we'd do the same if an American citizen published a secret horde of Australian government or military papers.
This is how civilized nations interact, whether formally or informally.
Allowing actions like this, even in the spirit of whistleblowing, would severely undermine the necessary order and discipline an effective military needs. It is certainly not the business of a private to determine what type of classified information should or should not be distributed.
"I was just following orders"? No, US military are trained in their responsibility to refuse unlawful orders.
Manning failed to demonstrate integrity by releasing the data without first reporting that he believed the classification orders to be unlawful, but if they were in fact unlawful then he was supposed to ignore them.
Because if you're telling someone they cannot distribute information about a crime, that's a criminal offence AND can be summarily ignored.
If you're labelling something classified when it shouldn't be, that's as bad as leaking information and a breech of conduct.
They had evidence of a crime and a mountain of material that likely contained more evidence of crimes, but was so vast that no one person could vet every bit of data.
So they sought assistance in combing through that mountain.
There's a reason we don't work this way.
Imagine that the police have reason to suspect you might have committed a crime; do they then have the ability to just walk into your place and take every single thing you own, make those public, and then ask the public to sort through them for evidence of a crime?
You wouldn't want that.
There's a reason the legal system operates as it does.
We the people do not recognize this plea.
Bradly Manning has been subjected to long term isolation, humiliation, mental and physical stress. We believe his plea to be made under duress and so it is not valid, and not recognized by the people. Those holding him should have thought of that.
At the same time, many in the Obama administration got a slap on the wrist for leaking information, and at the least they should get the same treatment as Bradley Manning, or Bradley Manning should get the same treatment as them.
If you published that article about the king of Burma - perfectly legal to do here in the US. Should we then send you over there to die for blasphemy because what you did was illegal in a country 4000 miles away.
We wouldn't do that because their system of law doesn't comport to our basic notions of due process. There may also be other extradition issues, since in general the US is unwilling to extradite people to places where they'll get a show trial and immediate execution.
Our laws end at our borders.
Not really, if you think about it. We have numerous extradition treaties and are part of several international standards groups that seek to equalize our law with that of other country.
Manning is not the police. The government is not a person. Evidence is not merely "reason to suspect". This is a case of the system of military justice failing due to institutional corruption, and Bradley Manning took extreme but justified measures to expose it.
Except that the total amount of proof of anything Manning has done at the moment, is ZERO.
You mean, except for the thing about him pleading guilty to charges? You know, described in that thing at the top of this page we call a summary?
http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/When_the_Innocent_Plead_Guilty.php is one list of people who pled guilty to crimes of which they were later proven innocent in courts of law. Between them they served 150 years before the actual criminals were identified.
Pleading guilty, let alone just offering to plead guilty is not "proof" that someone committed any crimes.
You're wrong about Assange. Sure, he has zero way of predicting the consequences of publishing evidence of crimes, but you don't have any way to predict the consequences of driving to work, either. By driving to work, you might kill someone. But probably not, and that's certainly not what you're trying to do. Same goes for Assange in outing government bullshit.
Furthermore, what Assange did wasn't even against any laws, and unlike Manning is alleged to, he didn't break his word. Assange didn't even violate laws in spirit nor is he innocent of crimes based on mere technicalities.
Illegal or not, I can see that you think what he did was undesirable, so you get a pass on the charges of abusing the word "guilty." ;-) But even so, you're wrong because what he did was good and desirable and everyone (especially US citizens since we bear the brunt of responsibilities for our government's abuses) will be better off if it starts happening a lot more often.
Let's hope more of our government's crimes get published. I hate not finding out about garbage that I'm paying for until far-to-late.
I don't see why he can't be let go. Name the people he's harmed. Sure he's embarrassed a bunch of government bureaucrats, but since they work for me - the tax paying citizen, I can hardly see a problem with that.
I suppose what he did was treason, violated the government's legal edicts, but seriously here. This US is a man made institution, not a god, not an ends in itself. Freedom is the ends, the state is supposed to be the means to protect that. Letting him go is going to harm everybody how?
extreme but justified measures to expose it.
At the expense of putting people at risk due to the exposure. Had he of just release one or two documents and/or a limited number of videos then there would likely have still been a public outcry and major investigations launched to root things out; however, by releasing everything he effectively put lives at risks as well as years if not decades of diplomacy on the chance that there might have been other crimes.
It was set up so that the archive could be distributed safely, and manning believed that only the wikileaks people would have direct access to it. lives would not have been at risk if the newpaper wasn't stupid enough to publish the krypto keys to the archive.
I think you have purchased the services of an underage prostitute.
Therefore, I release all of your financial records from the past 15 years online for the world to see.
Does that strike you as fair?
Exactly.
These leaks weren't evidence, but fishing for evidence, with a lot of collateral damage besides.
If Manning leaked the data and WikiLeaks published it, there is a strong precedent for the actions of WikiLeaks to be protected by the First Amendment's guarantee of press freedom.
IF however, the prosecution can "prove" that Julian Assange or whomever encouraged or participated in the leak, they could be prosecuted as an accessory.
This is why the US government has been subjecting Manning to cruel and inhumane conditions for so long. I wonder if he has held fast, or if they have finally broken his resolve and coerced him into implicating WikiLeaks as being party to the theft?
so, clearly the military is witholding, but people like Manning and Assange are ensuring they can't keep things illicitly secret. Unless you're saying that the military allowed these two to get the information, in which case why is Bradley in court?
The point is how we fight against evil. More great evils have been introduced in the fight against evil, throughout history, than in any other way.
Here, we're looking at huge amounts of government information being released, not an investigation. If Manning had found some incriminating information, brought it to the attention of his superiors, and insisted they fight it out in military court, he would have been acting legally and sensibly.
Instead what he did is to sabotage the entire process.
Result: in the future, people will cover up any war crimes that happen, but they'll do it at the point of origin. Meaning that if you accidentally shoot one villager, you'd better shoot them all and leave no witnesses.
Further, it's unclear to me that his motivation was prosecuting war crimes. It seems he was discontented and wanted revenge. Same with Assange.
The idea that individual citizens are going to monitor government by stealing bulk secrets is a fallacy. No one has even managed to go through all of the Wikileaks files yet.
Further, what I'm saying is not "discard responsibility" but to apply it through a hierarchy and to do it sensibly. Government, espionage and war is a rough business. Some secrets must be kept; for this reason we have internal investigations which, as I understand it, were slowly responding to the incidents in question, like they have to several before and since.
You're making a moral crusade out of a common theft, and suggesting a course of action that will make everything worse.
I think what matters is the end result, and whether your "idealistic viewpoint" actually achieves its goals, not how you feel about it.
All the hardcore authoritarian fascists want him dead, I wonder if they'll get their wish. If so, I wonder if Adrian Lamo will feel any guilt at all for ending this guy's life for no fucking reason (attention? "Remember me? I'm still around, everyone!")
Right. Because it's Adrian's fault that Manning chose to distribute documents which he was clearly not authorized to distribute. Whether you think it's right or wrong for him to have distributed them, it's not like anyone can be under the illusion that Manning's actions would have been considered legal. He alone is responsible for what happens to him.
In specific the Cablegate leak was absolutely irresponsible and could have put lives at risk. It saved no lives.
So he is also responsible for the cruel and inhumane treatment during his 900+ days incarceration. Also responsible for what people might call torture? And he is responsible for not getting the right to a speedy trial?
Make sure to keep donating to his defense fund:
Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610. Put "Bradley Manning Defense" on the memo line.
Find free books.
Yes private should obey and obey and obey and not be able to determine that the info they have been given should be "whistle blowed".
Frankly i thought we were over that in the Nuremberg trials were it was clearly said "obeying order is not a defense" and now you tell us it should not be up to the human having the job of private to determine what should or should not be whistle blowed. tsk tsk tsk.
Because if not, then it is indiscriminate.
I can appreciate the need for people to sometimes break their word and trust and reveal secrets in the case of a crime. The most famous recently modern case people like to cite is the Pentagon Papers.
However, for that to be valid, what is released need to be what is relevant, nothing more. You don't just release any and everything you can get your hands on. When you do that, it is tabloid type shit, publishing information just for the sake of it.
So, was everything leaked evidence of a crime? If not then you need to do some thinking. You can't use "evidence of a crime" as justification if it indeed wasn't.
Also you might want to check the laws because you are rather confused: People are not required to come forward and report crimes, by and large. There are cases where they are but for the most part if you see a crime and choose not to report it, that is not illegal.
What you think the law should be has no bearing on what it actually is.
When you get clearance, you give your word not just in a pro-forma sense but a legally binding sense as well not to reveal the information you are given access to. It is a crime to do so, and you have explicitly promised not to.
If the government just decides to write that one off and let people go, well then there's a good chance that others would choose to do it as well. Some people will honor their word, others need a bit more of a reason and if that reason is removed they may not do as they should.
Remember to think of the larger consequences. You might be inclined to say "Ya more information is a good thing!" however is that what you really want? Think of it on a personal level: Would you want someone in the government leaking out all your personal information they have, without consequence?
Nobody said martyrdom should be easy. By its very definition, it is not.
Bradley Manning did break his oath; he is guilty and will be punished accordingly. But what he did was, in the end, the right thing to do: he is a martyr of truth.
However the stuff he released wasn't stuff we already knew was going on anyways. The stuff that he leaked, was more embarrassing in the fact that it got leaked out then the content. However the real problem is the fact it included the names of the people. Where say Lt. Joe Smith, bombed a house of innocent civilians that his intelligence told him it was a terrorist stronghold. So now the family of those civilians may go on a vendetta against Lt. Joe Smith. Or the fact that Joe Smith was part of some regiment. They went to the next town where they would have had support they now have resistance, because the information may make them seem like a rogue unit, vs. and unfortunate accident of war.
This wasn't whistle blowing material. If say the US was using chemical weapons to devastate a town. Where the US is in violation of war crimes and showed a policy of knowing about and supporting such crimes, that is whistle blowing material. What he did was just stupid and deserves to be locked up for.
I agree with you. The only time where leaking makes sense is to protect our lives. To protect civilian lives. Leaking the names of intelligence sources is exactly what puts civilian lives at the most risk as intelligence sources are civilians. I think in the case of Lt. Joe Smith that's not a civilian so leaking his name is bad but not quite evil like leaking the name of spies or intelligence sources who aren't trained for combat, who may not even know they are helping the US government, who may not even know that they are spies until they read some leaked document.
A spy does not get treated as a prisoner of war. A spy has no human rights. A spy if captured faces being tortured to death, having their entire family tortured to death, and the worst of the worst abuses from governments around the world. Any leak which subjects any human being to that treatment is the leak of a traitor. The whole argument for leaking is based on the premise of stopping such treatment from occurring.
You're confusing two concepts:
1. The ends justify the means
2. The ends, not the means, determine the goal
You'll notice they're incompatible.
For starters, #2 doesn't involve any justifications and in fact is hostile to them. It's goal-based, not justification-based.
The first seems to me like an after-the-fact justification, which makes no sense if you're planning policy at all.
These concepts are visually similar but quite different when you put them to analysis.
They're both parties. The treatment doesn't vary.
As I said above, "reason to suspect" is needed for a search for evidence. We don't allow cops to publish the contents of your hard drive because you might have some illegal content on it. Instead, we have a legal process.
Did it fail, or was it moving slowly?
So, if I think you're breaking the law, and you haven't been arrested yet, we can publish the contents of your hard drive as "extreme but justified" measures.
Actually, Wikileaks approved the release of the password:
Yes, he's a war hero.
No, he's not. He's not a patriot, he's not honorable, he is NOT a hero. The men who almost starved to death at Valley Forge were patriots. The men who fought at Belleau Wood, climbed aboard the landing craft at Iwo and Normandy, liberated the camps at Dachau, owned the skies above New Britain, manned the destroyers protecting the lifeline of Britain, took part in that last fateful attack at Gettysburg or charged the wall at Fredericksburg, fought through the biting cold at the Chosin Reservoir, flew Hueys into hot landing zones to evacuate wounded, and helped pull down the statue of Saddam in Baghdad, those are the men that have honor. The ones resting on an island in the Pacific or on the European continent; the ones laying undiscovered in the jungles of SE Asia or lying entombed on the cold, barren floor of the Atlantic, THOSE are the heroes. Manning is none of these. He is a naive kid that betrayed his country and dishonored his brothers past, present, and future. He made his bed and now he should lie in it.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
...
I'll come in again.
It doesn't need disinfecting.
1. Government needs to keep some secrets.
2. It wasn't clear that in this case the alleged war crimes would not be prosecuted.
Further, I'm not sure it is.
Sunlight has been shining on a lot of facts for years without people acting on them. If anything, throwing the judgment back to the unruly mob of the general citizenry who are your "sunlight," leads to a lynch mob mentality which is less likely to find truth and more likely to jump to conclusions.
Imagine that the police have reason to suspect you might have committed a crime; do they then have the ability to just walk into your place and take every single thing you own, make those public, and then ask the public to sort through them for evidence of a crime?
The government doesn't have a constitutional right to a fair trial. It has unlimitedaccountability to all its citizens, from Bradley Manning to you and I.
Unfortunately, "accountability" doesn't mean much in an information vacuum. Fortunately, Bradley Manning is a fucking hero and helped fill that vacuum in the face of egregious offenses by our government. Also unfortunately, that just happens to make him a criminal, but that doesn't make his actions any less noble.
As for Assange - Seriously folks, lose the hard-on for the poor bastard - Our lying cheating murdering leaders would like nothing more than for us to get distracted by what he did or didn't do, rather than asking what our leaders did or didn't do. Instead of a special prosecutor indicting the whole goddamned government, we had a media circus of politicians praying we'll fall for all the finger pointing in the direction of Sweden. Assange, for his part, amounts to nothing more than an attention whore who happened to end up in the right place at the right time. If not Wikileaks, you would have seen the same info as a Pastebin, or on Rapidshare, or perhaps just leaked to a few major media outlets.
This could be true. However, I'm not sure that it is, because you're not compromising the secrecy of any documents. You're asking about a topic or an event. If what some people here are saying is true, and this was about alleged war crimes, you FOIA all documents related to those incidents. That reveals nothing about a specific document.
Bradley Manning is gay.
Gays, like women and minorities, are a protected group.
Employers are reluctant to not promote people from protected groups because if those people sue, there will be an assumed violation on the part of the employer and barring serious document instances of misconduct or incompetence by the employee, it's hard to prove they needed to be kept from the promotion.
As his manager, I would have promoted him. No use having a lawsuit destroy my career!
The Rosenbergs would like a word with you.
Yes, they're the only domestic examples, but we're much less discriminate when it comes to killing people outside our borders.
and
Of all the words used to describe him, "stable" doesn't come to mind.
He's having a prolonged temper tantrum at the military for not accepting him how he wants them to accept him.
He also had a relationship break up, and then his mental state deteriorated, and then he released these documents.
The statements about "war crimes" are after-the-fact justifications.
If you subvert the hierarchy, you introduce total chaos and dysfunction, which makes it less likely that they'll become less corrupt and incompetent. To use your word, "lawlessness" is the result of illegal and disproportionate acts like the one Bradley Manning did.
Those are protected and classified communications.
Agencies (even the military) share information with each other provided its classified status can be preserved.
This isn't a question of a list, but of methods and goals.
There is a correct method for addressing any problem, which is "to question the actions and orders of those over them and escalate them up the chain if needed" as AC said above.
If his goal is to fix a problem, he needs to use the correct method.
At that point, why doesn't he just get his hands on a nuke and take out Washington, D.C.?
There's a channel for addressing abuses within the military and it needs to be used.
This case wasn't about his altruistic goals. It was about him having problems in his personal life, and lashing out at the military.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/7918632/Bradley-Manning-suspected-source-of-Wikileaks-documents-raged-on-his-Facebook-page.html
Are you forgetting the people who got killed ? What about them having been "exposed to" a lethal force ? Do you just shove that under the rug ?
What about their families and friends which have been kept in the dark and maybe being "exposed to" all kinds of doubts about what their children, sibblings, friends got into ?
Maybe if the gouverment would have been less secretive (understatement) this exposure would never have been needed or happened. Have you ever thought of that ?
Not by his superiors.
And there is NO REQUIREMENT to whistleblow to your superiors.
And should NOT have been classified.
Go look up the rules on misclassification of government documents.
But will we see the Lt who plonked the "CLASSIFIED" on documents illicitly in court?
No.
But an invalid classification of "CLASSIFIED" is an illegal order too and can be ignored by the member of the armed forces.
He is a criminal so just take him to the back wood shed and shoot him.
Sure. but the people who would stand trial for any of the crimes uncovered by Manning certainly are people.
So perhaps a better analogy would be, "I work for the IRS. I believe somebody cheated on their taxes. So here's all the tax information for the last 20 years on a DVD, available to the public for download. I hope that the public will help me comb through all of this financial data and find the few people who cheated, so we can bring them to justice."
USA signed the Geneva Conventions. US Treaty obligations to Geneva Conventions Treaty superseed all other considerations.
The US cannot commit war crimes or hide evidence of war crimes behind false legal constructs
Or is that the issue you're thinking of? That there are no leaks of such information attributable to WL and Manning, so you can't get him for that?
But apparently nobody can find it.
Because no such leak leading to such an incident ever happened here.
PS how come you don't seem to mind asserting such has happened but whine off about how you can't know it happened when asked to support your assertion?
IF YOU DON'T KNOW, DON'T SAY.