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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.""
What is Julian Assange guilty of?
What crime is it to publish documents your receive?
He is not a US citizen so he cannot have any responsibility to the US government.
I sure as hell would rather know what our government is doing. You might not, but I sure as hell would.
THe collateral murder video and its coverup.
There was also the little part of a us contractor paying for boy sex slaves as bribe to a afghanistan warlord.
The majority of it wasn't particularly offensive, but there were a few malignant little gems in there.
My feeling is that the US government by consistently refusing to ask for the death penalty in spying cases [...] has encouraged people to continue to try to get away with this.
The US gov't could seek the death penalty for spying cases, but chooses not to. The reason is that a caught spy will eventually talk about why they did it, and who they were working with, if the death penalty isn't an option. That information is far more valuable than naively "trying to send a message". (Whether or not the death penalty is a deterrent is a separate argument. The intelligence officers only care about determining why the spying occurred and who the handlers were.)
Did Julian Assange then publish these secrets, knowing that he has zero way of predicting the consequences? Yes: he's guilty.
There are 2 big reasons why what Assange did is not a crime:
1. Given that Julian Assange is not and has never been a US citizen or resident of the US, why is US law applicable to any action he takes? For example, if a Iranian spy working in Afghanistan uncovers classified information about the US military, the US can't demand that spy's extradition and expect to get anything out of that.
2. Pentagon Papers case. The US Supreme Court has stated quite clearly that First Amendment protections apply to those who publish classified information, provided they weren't the ones leaking the information. And as you've stated, Manning was the one who provided the information to Assange, just like Ellsberg provided the information to the New York Times.
So (a) US law doesn't have jurisdiction, and (b) even if it did, it's still not illegal.
I am officially gone from
Clearly the military isn't withholding much, if anything
Clearly the military HAS WITHELD information. Damning information. Information that would have made the war less popular, removed support, and ultimately caused us pull out and end the occupation. Oh look. That happened. We even voted in a guy with that platform and didn't vote for the guy who wanted us to stick around getting shot at.
But hey, I think I get what you're saying. The military isn't withholding information from the government. Yeah, that's probably more or less true. But the people would still like to know. You know, since this is a democracy, we're supposed to be the ultimate political masters here.
I suspect the military may have some views on the matter of being told to leave people unsupported in battle.
Depends on who and what sort of battle. I don't think our ground pounders cared two bits about keeping neighbors from killing each other in Iraq during the rampant sectarian violence. Maybe the generals did, but they weren't the ones catching lead. None of them probably care enough about women's rights to keep the Taliban from being popular though.
lead to the military simply ignoring the civilian government... Having an administration that believes they can direct the military to "stand down" in the face of an armed enemy can certainly bring that about.
Well they didn't in Vietnam. We left and stopped a horrible clusterfuck of death and violence. Sadly, the north killed a whole hell of a lot of people when they invaded. That sectarian violence is a bitch isn't it? But after that the place largely got their shit in order. In short, the west propping up a regime that had no other support was a really bad idea. And stopping it was largely a success story of the peacenick hippies. Peace out dude.
in the new spirit of there not being any more terrorism in the world, at least there isn't if we do not call it terrorism
Dude, for a while there EVERYTHING was terrorism. Donating money to someone who knew someone who talked like a terrorist was terrorism. Suggesting that we should stop killing random people in the desert was terrorism. Trying to have a discussion about the definition of terrorism would get you suspected of terrorism. If that's swinging back to the region of sanity, it's a good thing.
Bradley Manning's "revelations" might have surprised some people, but clearly it did not surprise most people in governments around the world.
Oh, when you air their dirty laundry they are most certainly surprised. They never really expect to have to answer for their crimes.