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Bradley Manning Convicted of Espionage, Acquitted of 'Aiding the Enemy'
crashcy sends word that a verdict has been handed down in the case of Bradley Manning. Quoting:
"A military judge on Tuesday found Pfc. Bradley Manning not guilty of aiding the enemy, but convicted him of multiple counts of violating the Espionage Act. Private Manning had already confessed to being WikiLeaks’ source for a huge cache of government documents, which included videos of airstrikes in which civilians were killed, hundreds of thousands of front-line incident reports from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, dossiers on men being held without trial at the Guantánamo Bay prison, and about 250,000 diplomatic cables. But while Private Manning had pleaded guilty to a lesser version of the charges he was facing, which could expose him to up to 20 years in prison, the government decided to press forward with a trial on a more serious version of the charges, including 'aiding the enemy' and violations of the Espionage Act. Beyond the fate of Private Manning as an individual, the 'aiding the enemy' charge — unprecedented in a leak case — could have significant long-term ramifications for investigative journalism in the Internet era."
Aiding the enemy carries the death penalty, but they can't really murder Manning if they want Snowden extradited, can they?
" But when you agree to join the military and have a security clearance you make promises to protect that information. With your life, if necessary. He not only went against that promise, he blatantly gave away that information!"
" I, (NAME), 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."
What happens when the first half is at odds with the second?
...for the crimes that he's convicted of.
When leaks like this one happen, a lot of attention and effort is spent on punishing the leaker, but we seldom hear about punishment for those that should have protected the data. Why did Manning not only have access to this sensitive data, but was able to download it and walk it out of the office?
In my company, the receptionist isn't supposed to tell anyone what's in our sensitive financial documents and really has no reason to read them. So he can't - his login doesn't have access to those files and if he persists in trying to get access, his username will come up in IPS alerts.
While I suppose it's publicly comforting to go after the leakers once they are caught, what about the spies that steal the data and hand it over quietly to their keepers? If the data is so easy to access that an Army Private can walk in and download thousands of documents, does anyone really think that spies from other nations aren't doing the same thing? The Army should thank Manning for exposing their security flaws.
The same applies to Snowden - he shouldn't have been able to download thousands of pages of classified documents and walk out with them unnoticed.
So who's getting fired over lax security?
Convicted of violation of the Espionage Act? Ah, well then we should revise said act to retroactively apply exemption to actions which do not aide the enemy. For, if they do not aide the enemy, then they aide the ally or no one. Surely we can't be throwing people in jail for helping us?
>Both Snowden and Manning took oaths with a clear understanding that they would be severely penalized if they violated that trust.
If the government is relying on an *oath* to protect my data, then I'm even more outraged that they have so much of my data.
Outside of a court, an oath means nothing - it's as valuable as a double-super pinky swear. The government wants me to believe that terrorists are out to kill me even if it means killing themselves, but at the same time, I'm supposed to believe that an oath is going to protect my data as well as national secrets because no evildoer would swear on god that they won't do something bad?
Data security is not cheap (in implementation costs or labor), but if we're supposed to believe that having this data out in the wild could be compromising our national security, isn't it worth securing the data? Fort Knox doesn't leave piles of gold around the complex and just rely on staff to promise not to take it - they have serious security protocols that limit access to the gold and don't let any single person in a position where they could steal it, even if it makes working there less efficient.
It's unfortunate they didn't use a more legitimate whistle-blowing channel - they've thrown away their lives.
When those that are collecting the data are willing to outright lie about it to congress, and even those in congress that knew about the data collection are still defending it, what is the legitimate whistle-blowing channel that will let the public know what's going on?
You could just as easily argue that his mass dump of the documents shows that his motive was to do his duty to the constitution:
Therefore, short of finding a few thousand other people in the military who were all willing to similarly stick their necks out, the only way he could fulfill his perceived duty to reveal those abuses was to mass release the documents to a neutral third party (the press) with adequate resources (people and time) to review them in a timely manner.
Based on that, I would argue that the only questions that can reasonably be asked are whether he had a duty to tell the world about these abuses, and whether that duty trumped his duty to keep military secrets. All other questions are meaningless.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Manning probably conspired with Assange to get the information to Wikileaks. Wikileaks made the information available to anyone that wanted it, including the Taliban and al Qaida. The Taliban and al Qaida are the enemy, not the US public and international press. The Taliban stated that they were using the information to hunt down informants. That is where the charge of "aiding the enemy" came from.
That is a more useful explanation than your troll.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell