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Bradley Manning Makes Statement
Bradley Manning, the 25-year-old U.S. Army soldier who allegedly leaked hundreds of thousands of internal memos about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, has been held by the government for two and a half years. On Thursday he pleaded guilty 10 of 22 charges brought against him, and now he has released an official statement. Here's an excerpt:
"On 3 February 2010, I visited the WLO website on my computer and clicked on the submit documents link. Next I found the submit your information online link and elected to submit the SigActs via the onion router or TOR anonymizing network by special link. ... I attached a text file I drafted while preparing to provide the documents to the Washington Post. It provided rough guidelines saying ‘It’s already been sanitized of any source identifying information. You might need to sit on this information– perhaps 90 to 100 days to figure out how best to release such a large amount of data and to protect its source. This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of twenty-first century asymmetric warfare. Have a good day. After sending this, I left the SD card in a camera case at my aunt’s house in the event I needed it again in the future. I returned from mid-tour leave on 11 February 2010. Although the information had not yet been publicly by the WLO, I felt this sense of relief by them having it. I felt I had accomplished something that allowed me to have a clear conscience based upon what I had seen and read about and knew were happening in both Iraq and Afghanistan everyday."
I don't disagree about how our terribly our government works, but it's kind of funny that you conveniently left out the very next question in that interview:
QUESTION: Is this file, by any chance, connected to the invitation – extended invitation – for President Mubarak to visit the United States?
SECRETARY CLINTON: No. It’s an annual report. It is not in any way connected. We look forward to President Mubarak coming as soon as his schedule would permit. I had a wonderful time with him this morning. I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.
QUESTION: How do you view the presidency in Egypt, the future of the presidency in Egypt?
SECRETARY CLINTON: That’s for the people of Egypt to decide. That is a very important issue that really is up to Egyptians.
Scorta futuere amo!
I am sorry that you still believe that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were "wars against terrorism". Missions into these countries were already planned before September 11, 2011.
Do read up on the organisation Project for the New American Century.
Read what the PNAC had been lobbying the Clinton administration to do, long before September 11, 2001, and do look at which high-ranking members of PNAC that had got high positions in the Bush administration in 2001.
This is not a theory of mine about a supposed secret conspiracy. It has been out in the open all the time. For years, PNAC had a public web site where all this information was available.
Torture is not only not civilized, it is also not reliable. The victim tends to not answer what the torturer wants to hear, not he truth.
Back in 2003, there was no indication whatsoever that Al-Qaeda had any connection with Saddam Hussein. The only testimony that there was a link had been obtained during torture - a testimony that was later proven to be false. After the invasion, no proof of any link had been found.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
He wasn't in the best frame of mind because he was having serious psychological issues related to gender identity disorder, sexuality in a "don't ask, don't tell" military, and a handful of other issues. He was looking at a possible discharge from service.
Lay off the rhetoric, it's making you jumpy.
Then one of the said newspapers hired CmdrTaco. Taco was able to explode the zip file with gzip but then he refused to let others read the documents inside because the documents were not in an open format.
Compared to most of the world, they are definitely about average in the spectrum from say Norway which probably has the best democracy to North Korea which is probably the furthest from democracy.
That is definitely better than the average for the middle east which is the worst region in the world overall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index