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."
Slashdot editor senteced to 35 years of grammar school.
Exactly. Reading comments from pro-Manning people, you would think there is a huge list of horrendous crimes that he made public, but that is simply not the case. To me, the stuff he made public actually kinda proved that we are the good guys after all. Even the few incidents that are iffy (that apache video) are fucking videotaped, archived, investigated etc and eventually they tend to become public knowledge. What other country has ever done any of that? Russians in Afghanistan routinely carpet bombed towns and villages as a collective punishment and killed over a million of Afghan civilians and even Russians will still bitch about the US being bad guys for some reason. You want us to be perfect? Fine, I want that to, but at least I realize that perfection in war is not possible and I try to have some perspective.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.