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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
Never
No sig today...
When shit roles uphill and hell freezes over.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
> You know, the ones who approved of the illegal activities by the military personal who Manning *PROPERLY* released information about?
Releasing classified documents to an uncleared foreign national is NOT "properly released", it's illegal and punishable by imprisonment and in some cases death. The illegality of his actions and the resulting punishment were VERY well known to him, as it is to every single soldier that holds his clearance level. There were proper ways for him to handle himself, which he was retrained on every single year, but he made very specific decisions to break serious laws. He knew what he was getting into.
That said... It's not a relevant issue here. Manning is not a war hero. He is a traitor.
___ I don't respond to Anonymous Cowards, and I Never Mod them UP.
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.
Most of them are dead. We haven't been at war in 65 years.
> It's a shame how this country treats our war heroes.
Calling Bradley Manning a "War Hero" is incredibly disrespectful to all the Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen that honorably served their country. You, sir, are rubbish.
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.
They weren't secrets, it was evidence. Evidence of the crimes committed by military personnel. Anyone else who knew of the evidence, that didn't speak up, that didn't bring it forward, was aiding and abetting criminals. Period.
So you and your "unpopular view" can go fuck yourself. He did the right and legal thing.
Everyone else who knew about should be charged (And convicted and sentenced) with the crimes listed in the evidence, period!
*PROPERLY* released information about?
Properly? Wow. He released EVERYTHING, not just data that pertained to alleged abuses. It's roughly analogous to an IRS employee leaking everyone's tax returns because he suspects his boss is cheating on his taxes.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Military personnel are trained not to follow illegal orders. Those personnel who followed them are the criminals.
You can't hide *EVIDENCE* by stamping it as CLASSIFIED. Doesn't work that way.
Evidence is evidence, and you cannot by charged of any wrongdoing when being a whistleblower - federal law covers that.
This is a kangaroo court proceeding, where the kangaroos in question are guilty of the crimes evidenced.
Please, go and die in an undisclosed grave, would you kindly? Thank you in advance.
Absence of proof != proof of absence.
We don't know what government does and a lot of it we'd rather not know.
Speak for yourself.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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.
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.
systems self-police really well. we all know that from common everyday experience.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
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."
Seems like that's exactly what's going on here. "We're the government, we run things, we determine what the public needs to know and what it doesn't." Society may work with rules dictating what it can know and what it can't, but most of us hold transparency and knowledge about what our government is doing much higher than the government does itself. I'd rather risk the public knowing too much than too many secrets being held. When are we going to punish the military brass for keeping too many things secret from us?
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?
Yeah, we're civilians. We have a right to privacy. We pay for the military, not vice versa. And the military keeping secrets from the citiznery is much more dangerous than vice versa as well: they're much better armed. A military coup is much more of a threat than a civilian uprising in my book.
Did Julian Assange then publish these secrets, knowing that he has zero way of predicting the consequences? Yes: he's guilty.
That is not a crime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_States
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.
Yea, its really inconvenient when someone reveals the crimes that your business performs to the public. People might not buy your products if they knew you bribed Afghanistan warlords with little boys to be used as sex slaves.
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, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God." The Oath.
When the people within the government abandon their principals, commit crimes, and use secrecy as a cover, they become a domestic enemy of the United States and its Constitution. Bradley Manning was put in a position where it was impossible to fulfill the entirety oath, because the people who were giving orders were the domestic enemies of the United States and its Constitution. The compromise he made was the moral one, and I do not fault him for it.
However, for a society to work, we need to have rules. .
And when those rules are broken, as they were by the US military, there need to be whistle blowers, to bring the miscreants into line, and put them in trial for their illegalities.
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?
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.
Did Julian Assange then publish these secrets, knowing that he has zero way of predicting the consequences? Yes: he's guilty.
Guilty of what? Releasing foreign documents of unknown validity? Since when is that illegal?
...is going to result in a government that will be totally adversarial to us and will hide a lot of secrets..
As opposed to the way it is now where the government has no secrets at all?
Rightness has nothing to do with the legality. And the legality he falls under is not civilian or crimial court that you know, byt the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a special code of law that applies to all military personel. And what he did was very clearly illegal, regardless of what you think Mr. AC.
And there was no evidence. If you had actually looked at teh leaked stuff, you would know that. But likely you're one of hte same people that just assumes you know what's there, that assumes all the miulitary people are criminals, that Bush was assassinating left and right like I see some /.'ers post, etc.
In short, you dont have a clue what youre talking about, Mr. AC, so all you vitriol can be flushed down the toilet where it belongs.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Sure, Manning violated military law/protocol (I don't know what the proper term is) and yes that makes him guilty. However he has not been tried and found guilty by due process. No matter how guilty he seems, he has only been accused at this point and yet he has been locked in solitary confinement and forced to take drugs for years while he awaits his trial. So who is violating the rules here? Is the military above accountability? Should only the lone solider or citizen have to follow the rules while the military or government can do whatever it wants and hide whatever it wants?
Wikileaks, among other things, exposed the murder of two journalists by a helicopter gunship. Not only did this lead to an investigation--and I'm certain that the person that pulled the trigger in that video isn't in solitary confinement being force-fed drugs--but it raised awareness of the fact that crimes are being committed and covered up. No one is suggesting trying to monitor every part of the government or any form of perfect transparency--we have collectively acknowledged the necessity that certain information be kept from public knowledge until it is no longer sensitive. But a completely opaque government that rubber-stamps embarrassments or evidence of criminal acts as "classified" is tyranny.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Give this man the 'Good German" award.
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.
Perhaps we could execute you instead? It would be an improvement.
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.
You have no clue what you are talking about.
This is not civil court or criminal court. They do not apply.
When you join the military the UCMJ takes precedence.
It is not kangaroo court, and Federal law provides no protections to Manning or what he did.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
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.
I'm not asking for personal information on government officials, I'm asking for information on what they're doing with my money and in my name. It's difficult to understand what you think is wrong with that.
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.
Their beliefs mean fuck-all to the people they harmed.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Why, the General's are already charged. After all, Manning is the General's. Now, the Generals won't get charged, but the General's already have been.
Free Martian Whores!
This was covered before, and you were proven wrong then too.
Espionage is an internationally recognized crime.
His citizenship is irrelevant.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
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.
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
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.
This was covered before, and you were proven wrong then too.
Espionage is an internationally recognized crime.
His citizenship is irrelevant.
Which is why during the cold war the USA and USSR regularly approved extradition of their respective spies.
Seems to work just fine for the current administration though....
I mean, Eric Holder *is* still in office, isn't he?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Seriously?
Ok...maybe you can name the last few actual formal declarations of WAR that congress has passed...?
Tick-Tock....we're still waiting....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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?
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.
A little over ten years ago it would have been called journalism...
I seem to recall an incident with US soldiers being ordered by one of their superiors to rob a bank. I'd link the incident but, unsurprisingly, google and bing no longer turn up any results.
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.
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.
That right there is the real problem, and the root issue that needs to be addressed.
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.
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.
It's not illegal to receive or publish classified documents. Nor should it ever be illegal. If you're not responsible for keeping something secret you shouldn't be punished for doing your job as a journalist.
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.
Perhaps we could execute you instead? It would be an improvement.
Well, I completely disagree with any state-sanctioned murder, but I would go so far as to recommend mandatory castration for people like AC here.
Too dumb to breed...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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
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.
Even if you agree with the general political sentiment, please don't mod up the above post. It's a crystal clear attempt of trolling, deliberately mixing up all kinds of unrelated issues.
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!
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.
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."
If you give a group of men a monopoly on violence and then allow then to keep their actions secret from the people to whom they have nominal accountability: You're Gonna Have a Bad Time.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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
being a money grubbing douche bag 1st degree
It's more analogous to an IRS employee leaking all the corporate tax returns because he can see grievous infractions, is observing their coverup, and suspects widespread systematic corruption.
Which, you know, would probably do the world a whole hell of a lot of good. A lot of companies would take it right in the pants and some officials would get fired, but all in all I think it would be a net gain.
I'll come in again.
That's what you get with too much spanking.
I don't know whether Assange is guilty in this matter.
If he had a bunch of documents dumped on him by some US soldier, he had no obligation to keep them secret. That's well established.
If he tried to entice said soldier into giving him the documents, then he is likely guilty of espionage.
I assume this is what the US investigation was about: to determine exactly what he did. (Please disregard stupid statements from, say, the Congresswoman elected from Minnesota's Sith District. She does not in fact represent the US government, although she is an important part of it.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I knew someone would reply that they wished the IRS records would be released :)
I actually think that wouldn't be the end of the world, either - but the big difference is that the IRS doesn't kill people (and if they do, I hope a whistleblower steps up).
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You still haven't answered the parent's question. Irrespective of whether Manning is guilty or not, when do the generals who ordered illegal actions get charged?
Yes, but sometimes the ends don't justify the means. Exposing everyone in America to universal scrutiny to catch one guy's boss is probably not worth the tradeoff, no matter how nasty the boss is.
Anyway, any effects the release of the cables had were probably not what he anticipated.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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