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Bradley Manning Sentenced To 35 Years
An anonymous reader writes with bad, but not unexpected news: "The U.S. soldier convicted of handing a trove of secret government documents to anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks has been sentenced to 35 years in prison. Pte First Class Bradley Manning, 25, was convicted in July of 20 charges against him, including espionage. Last week, he apologized for hurting the U.S. and for 'the unexpected results' of his actions. He will receive credit for three and a half years, but be dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Army."
Considering today news is breaking about the NSA monitoring 75% of all domestic US internet traffic, and logging all domestic emails, as well as their plans for a national facial recognition system (as in live video feeds), it seems obvious to me that they sentenced him today and announced it in this way in an effort to distract us from what really matters.
Sources: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/nsa-has-access-75-percent-us-internet-traffic-says-wsj-6C10967780
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/us/facial-scanning-is-making-gains-in-surveillance.html?_r=0
"Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process."
The United States government is the largest criminal organization in the world. Bradley Manning exposed some of the war crimes routinely committed by the United States. That, in and of itself, makes him a hero. It takes no courage to invade another country that is drastically weaker than you are and to then shoot people (mostly civilians) who are simply defending their country from foreign invaders. It takes a lot of courage to stand up to the Imperial US Government.
You feel that because of some twisted nationalistic pride and unquestioning faith that the overlords are benevolent, know what they're doing, and are above the vast swaths of historical abuse by similar authority figures. We feel he's been unfairly treated because of a lot of things.
1) He exposed a whole hell of a lot of people doing "forbidden" things. Most of whom are never going to face prison time, courts, fines or even a slap on the wrist.
2) The people he's exposing have previously concealed their wrongdoing. Gaming the system of justice is serious infraction. It's often worse than what they're hiding.
3) The people he's exposing have a vast amount of political power and very much have control over his punishment. I don't think it's a stretch to say that they're abusing their power and being vindictive.
4) He's been tortured. Not the sort of torture with massive blood loss, hideous scars, and severed limbs, but the sort of torture you get in a lab setting. And it looks like it was enough to break him.
Yes, he should face consequences for violating orders and exposing secrets. And he should face praise and leniency for making the USA a better place and upholding his oath. You know, to protect the nation from threats from within.
Well because it was a shit-ton better before Bush. Back then the USA was riding high after the cold war and the worst that the president did was have an affair. Or raise taxes after promising not to. Or have an ill-conceived tax reform. Or just kinda not get much done. Or a crook who abused his position to spy on his political adversaries. And that was bad. Seriously bad. A stain upon our history. And that's getting to about the extent of our memory. I had to google who was president before Nixon, and I had forgotten about Carter. Sorry, there's only so much history I have at the tip of my mind.
Let me make this perfectly clear. Bush was FAR WORSE then ALL OF THAT. He took an emotionally unstable first-world super-power in a post-9/11 trauma and decided to invade Iraq. He lead us into a quagmire that cost a shit-ton of money, got a (historically small) number of US troops killed, got a SHIT-TON of civilians killed, and didn't have much to show for it all except something to put on his mantle and funneling billions of dollars to his friends. Let me repeat that: He pre-emptivly invaded a nation. He started a war based on a lie. He was objectively a far worse president than anything in the last 50 years, doing absolutely retarded things that damaged this nation and brought about hardship to us all.
Before Nixon is the long long ago where we had an idiot that double-downed on Vietnam. Or the guy who thought make-work would fix the economy. Or the asshole who thought sitting on his hands would keep it all from falling apart. And to be fair to Bush, Vietnam was worse, although LBJ didn't exactly start the whole thing. The atrocities that the CIA did in the name of fighting the commies was probably worse. Arguably it lead to 9/11, but that's almost a philosophical debate at this point.
The Obama administration has some originality you know.
Yeah, even Bush didn't straight up openly assasinate US citizens. That's a new terror. But most of this bullshit with surveillance really got going under Bush with the excuse that it was to fight the terrorists after 9/11. Obama certainly picked that up and is running with it, but we can still lay a portion of that blame at Bush's feet.
"No one has been tried for the crimes uncovered by Manning."
what crimes?
Child prostitution -SOMEONE at Dyncorp and the US government for employing them to do so.
Blackmail -SOMEONE at Pfizer.
Smuggling -SOMEONE at Chevron.
Espionage Hilary Clinton and the State department.
It goes on and on. It's almost as if there's a systematic flaw that's so pervasive it's hard to see the trees for the forest. Seriously, haven't you looked at any of this?
"No one has been tried for the crimes uncovered by Snowden."
it's on going, and he uncovered very few crimes.
Perjury - James Clapper.
Illegal warrantless espionage against US citizens on US soil. And no, FISA is not looking over their shoulder.
As a culture we haven't even decided if information sent though multiple servers around the globe IS private.
Yet as a legal body we HAVE decided that email is private for the first 180 days. At least by US law. And we're pretty damn sure even as an amorphous cultural body of billions of people that encrypted communications is private, so suck it.
You can try to refute all that citation (and hey, some of it might even be off), but you'd best bring a big-ass list of citeable sources and have a DAMN good argument for why I shouldn't believe what appears to be really bloody obvious to me.