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."

Comments

Before all you blowhards cheer the Feds ...

[anagama]

Read this by Harvard Law prof, Yochai Benkler:

The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112554#

If Bradley Manning is convicted of aiding the enemy, the introduction of a capital offense into the mix would dramatically elevate the threat to whistleblowers. The consequences for the ability of the press to perform its critical watchdog function in the national security arena will be dire. And then there is the principle of the thing. However technically defensible on the language of the statute, and however well-intentioned the individual prosecutors in this case may be, we have to look at ourselves in the mirror of this case and ask: Are we the America of Japanese Internment and Joseph McCarthy, or are we the America of Ida Tarbell and the Pentagon Papers? What kind of country makes communicating with the press for publication to the American public a death-eligible offense?

Note, the espionage act doesn't apply only to people in the military.

Re:Before all you blowhards cheer the Feds ...

[Brucelet]

The press has already been so grossly compromised by corporate influence that it's "critical watchdog function" isn't currently all that functional anyway

Re:Before all you blowhards cheer the Feds ...

[girlintraining]

Al Qaeda is perhaps the most brilliant organization on this planet. With such limited resources, they sure have crippled this great, free country to a common dictatorship.

People blame the terrorists for our plight, but let's look at this objectively: How much damage is this organization directly responsible for? A few buildings? Few thousand people dead? Whatever answer you come up with, even if you declare large swaths of the general population malignant, you can't approach the damage caused by our reaction.

If America fell, it wasn't because of the terrorists, but us. We allowed our elected representatives to do this to us. We voted them into office repeatedly, and willfully. There is no "it just fell from the sky and killed our country" option here. We did this to ourselves.

Point the finger in the right direction: Right back at you. Terrorists didn't do this, we did.

Re:Before all you blowhards cheer the Feds ...

[Demena]

Okay, disclosure. I am an Australian as is/was Murdoch. I have been alive through most of his business manipulations. I was once even an infinitesimal part of his empire. Never in my life have I known him to do anything altruistic. Everything is/was based on self interest. I wouldn't consider him liberal in any way. Even when he appears liberal it is based in self interest or maintaining power in both camps. Someone who appears liberal when the wind blows that way is not a liberal to me. A liberal has to be liberal in principle; has to have liberal principles and not switch as the wind blows. Murdoch has never appeared to fit this image. So I cannot see Murdoch as a liberal. Not in any way.

Re:Arab Spring

[anagama]

Democracy in the middle east is not considered a "good" by the Feds. They much prefer friendly ruthless dictators. Not for example how we've never invaded Saudia Arabia and never have a bad word to say about them. Or how HRC considered Mubarak a friend of the family ( http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/01/secretary-clinton-in-2009-i-really-consider-president-and-mrs-mubarak-to-be-friends-of-my-family/ ).

Re:Torturing ants

[anagama]

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!

Re:Torturing ants

[spire3661]

Civilized human beings do not torture their enemies, ever. There is no context that justifies TORTURING ANOTHER HUMAN BEING, EVER.

Re:Arab Spring

[jhoegl]

Actually, the key word is predictable.
If a leader is unpredictable, no one can do business with them.

Re:Torturing ants

[Mr. Slippery]

Paraphrasing Madeleine Albright: "What's the point of having such a powerful military, if we never use it?"

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.

Re:Torturing ants

[ATMAvatar]

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.

Re:Its hard to tell

[Ultracrepidarian]

And some of us learned this in Vietnam. My thought as I left, "We make enemies faster than we can kill them."