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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?
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.
Most of them are dead. We haven't been at war in 65 years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
A little over ten years ago it would have been called journalism...
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.
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.
Several people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran have been taken into custody/and or killed due information provided in the release of these documents. This is not a harmless crime.
And yet the government hasn't charged that, AC. Are you a paid misinformation agent?
Meanwhile, he may very well have saved tens of thousands of lives and helped spread democracy to the Middle East.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
Has it ever been explicitly established whether or not Manning (or other members of his company/platoon) attempted to seek advice from higher ups? Having served in the military myself, I can tell you that when you get a rotten chain of command, the damn thing is rotten from bottom to top. It may be that other members attempted to report what they'd seen and had been "stifled", either by military means (all of the shitty jobs, no sleep, limited rations, whatever - makes someone not have so much energy for fighting the status quo) or simply "disappeared".
Not saying that's what happened - I'm just saying that I'm seeing a lot of claims that Manning didn't seek an alternative process and I haven't seen any indication that that was the case. There comes a point where if all of the fruit you reach for is rotten, you start reaching in a different direction.
Again, not saying he's right, but we don't know all of the facts and we certainly don't understand the circumstances. Furthermore, the behavior of our military (or some small portions of it, at any rate) for the last few years has been intolerable...it seems we can't go a month without hearing about some solder murdering or raping someone...and that's just what we hear about. At the very least what Manning did was illustrate to the world the sorts of things that happen that we did not previously know about. That doesn't make him a hero, but I'm glad he did what he did.
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.
Voice of experience -
If you work for an abusive boss, telling them about it doesn't do any good. Often, it just makes things worse.
If you work for an abusive boss within a corporation that protects its management staff at all costs, going up the chain of command will only result in making your own life miserable. In such cases, the only viable option you have is to circumvent the chain of command and report the abuses to an outside, third party for resolution.
Besides, as far as I'm aware, no one related to the case has made any comment regarding whether or not he actually did circumvent the chain of command at all. Considering that his superiors are the ones who thought it wise to give an E1 (that's the lowest Army rank, for the laymen) access to all those classified documents, I for one would definitely take any claims they make with a heapin' helpin' of NaCl.
Speaking of which... is Manning the only one on trial here? What about the officers who gave him access he shouldn't have had in the first place?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese