Slashdot Mirror
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."
If any good come from this... Has it caused any measurable change in government policy? Or did it just cause tightening of their grip on classified data?
Read this by Harvard Law prof, Yochai Benkler:
The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112554#
Note, the espionage act doesn't apply only to people in the military.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
This was a big factor in the Arab Spring. There is a chance of good things resulting from that (it will be years before we know).
Palm trees and 8
Ahh, the very fine "your ancestors did something evil so you can't point out my current evil" retort. Brilliant. Settles the case for sure!
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Are you from one of the European nations without blood on its hands? Remind me, which one is that?
No, of course I'm not. But I'm from one that learned from the mistakes of the past and after centuries of war learned to get on with its neighbors.
You do realise that a lot of countries in the EU have been implicated in the torture and the ferrying of suspects to other countries with more lax rules on "interrogation methods"?
If there is one thing that the western European nations have not done, it is learn from the past, the same stuff is still going on today, including ignoring/violating international law when it suits them. The difference is that now they have the media to gloss over and sugercoat it so the citizens honestly feel they are the good guys.
Only capital punishment fits in a case like this because there are two factors so serious that no lesser punishment is appropriate.
The first is that the offender gave greater weight to his conscience than to the power of his state. He disobeyed orders and statute. Any student of 20th century history will tell you that blind obedience is the glue that binds successful societies and engenders success, safety and justice.
The second is that the offender communicated with people so depraved that they openly engage in journalism, a pursuit that has the potential to inform taxpayers and voters such that they eventually become able to make rational choices and decisions, regardless of the wishes of their superiors.
This has to stop now, and any repetition or emulation be discouraged by the least ambiguous means available.
Ah yes, because standing by and doing nothing while innocents are being slaughtered somehow lets you claim a clear conscious. Dictators and tyrants count on people like you to turn a blind eye to atrocities and genocide as it lets them get away with murder by the million.
Clean hands you have there, keep that chin up and remember useful idiots like yourself are as indispensable to mass murders like Stalin, Milosevic, Assad etc as their own armies. Carry on with pride, job well done, no blood on your hands at all. How's that Syria thing working out for you?
Civilized human beings do not torture their enemies, ever. There is no context that justifies TORTURING ANOTHER HUMAN BEING, EVER.
Good-bye
Ah yes, because standing by and doing nothing while innocents are being slaughtered somehow lets you claim a clear conscious. Dictators and tyrants count on people like you to turn a blind eye to atrocities and genocide as it lets them get away with murder by the million.
I was complaining about the US's war crimes, or don't they count as crimes if your own country does it?
Using torture is a war crime. It is not acceptable nor is it productive. Senior US military command is on record stating it is immoral and counter-productive. It should never happen and those who engage in it, foster it or approve it should be prosecuted.
The Founders were smart enough to realize the temptations of a standing army, and tried to put safeguards against one into the Constitution. That's part of what the Second Amendment is about -- not just the RKBA, but a structural defense against the formation of a military-industrial complex by relying on a militia rather than a large standing army. Too bad we opted for an empire instead; they never end well.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Things are not quite so simple. Our continual war also serves to justify the indefinite imprisonment of non-citizens without trial, giant military contracts handed-out to friends of those in power, and widespread and warrant-less surveillance of the public at large, among other things. In short, it's a nice means to expand power and corruption in US government.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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
You got your information wrong. Iraq was not destroyed because it had anything to do with 9/11. Iraq had nothing to do with it. Saddam Hussein was an opponent of Al Quaida. Iraq was destroyed because Hussein presumed to sell oil for Euros thus elimination the world wide requirement to purchase US dollars to buy oil which would decrease the US economy if the use of Euros became widespread.
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.
AH, but here's the rub: How do you know that he has lied? There's no way you can trust his information before the Bad Thing happens, because it's unverifiable. And, as cold reading shows us, it's very possible for him to tell you what he thinks you want to hear, once you start hurting him enough that he'll do anything to make it stop.
There's a reason the Inquisition was able to get people to confess to things which were untrue: torture.