>Manning, 25, was convicted last month [...] The government had asked [for] 60 years. “There is value in deterrence, your honor; this court must send a message [...] National security crimes that undermine the entire system must be taken seriously.”
This is not the rule of law. It is a government that is increasingly relying on citizen ignorance to secretly make and implement policy, and on savage reprisals to terrorize those who might expose the process.
Bradley Manning released a dump of over 700,000 files. Although there were some documents that revealed possible war crimes, there was no do due diligence performed to verify that the rest of the files were not putting people in danger. I'm curious as to how people are justifying those actions?
If someone releases a huge dump of classified files, without any possible war crimes, would we still defend them?
> If someone releases a huge dump of classified files, without any possible war crimes, would we still defend them?
Politics that do not have immediate personal consequences (or politics too hopeless to engage in) can easily become a spectator sport.
On that level, when an instance of "uh, all my private communication just leaked to the NSA" is followed by a case of "oh, tons of classified documents just leaked to the general public", then it's likely that this will be understood as a quid pro quo, i.e. appreciated by a large number of spectators.
I may be wrong but I believe at the time they said that they had gone through the documents to check for information that could put people in danger. They did a good job seemingly as the US govt said, internally, that nobody was endangered by the release of the documents.
"He has acknowledged that he publicly released the classified information that Valerie Plame Wilson was a secret agent for the CIA, triggering the Plame Affair, though he has said it was inadvertent."[1]
AFAICT (and IMHO peculiarly) nobody in this "affair" was ever actually charged with "revealing the identities of CIA agents", and Scooter Libby was definitely neither tried nor convicted of same. He was convicted of crimes (perjury, obstruction of justice), absolutely, but none that match your claim.
Further, according to [1] the case was pressed anew as a civil suit (by Wilson(s), and later, CREW, against Cheney, Rove, and Libby) which reached as high as the Supreme Court, failing at each step.
"The Wilsons have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their appeal of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruling. On May 20, 2009, the Justice Department, in a brief filed by Solicitor General Elena Kagan ...
"According to the brief filed by the [Obama] Justice Department:
"Petitioners allege that Novak's July 14, 2003 column publicly disclosed Ms. Wilson's covert CIA employment and that that disclosure 'destroyed her cover as a classified CIA employee.' Petitioners, however, allege that Novak's source was Armitage, and do not allege that any of the three defendants against whom Mr. Wilson presses his First Amendment claim-Cheney, Rove, and Libby-caused that column to be published. In the absence of factual allegations that Mr. Wilson's alleged injury from the public disclosure of his wife's CIA employment is 'fairly traceable' to alleged conduct by Cheney, Rove, or Libby, petitioners have failed to establish Article III jurisdiction over Mr. Wilson's First Amendment claim."[1]
> If someone releases a huge dump of classified files, without any possible war crimes, would we still defend them?
I would. I don't trust the government to decide what should and shouldn't be confidential, and I'd be curious to hear any justifications for why the government deserves even the slightest bit of trust.
So your position is that what that person did is OK because you personally don't trust the government?
What other crimes would you then permit because you don't trust the government? Would it be OK to stab soldiers then? They work the government. How about robbing postal workers? Which crimes no longer are crimes when the government is the victim, and which rules do you use to determine that?
And then take the same question and apply it to corporations. You may not trust Google, for instance; would you say that it's OK then for a Google employee to leak 700,000 random emails from GMail because that would embarrass Google? If not, why is your logic different here?
> So your position is that what that person did is OK because you personally don't trust the government?
What do you mean by "OK"? The question I was responding to was whether I would defend him, and I said yes. I'm not making a legal or moral argument, I'm just expressing my personal preference.
Didn't Snowden and Ellsberg also release a trove of files without "due diligence," relying on a third party to vet and process the files for publication?
no. Elseberg released one study about the Vietnam war. he actually read all of it and had been showing it around to senators and officials trying to get something done. he leaked it as a last resort.
in his video interview with the Guardian Snowden explicitly contrasted what he did with what Manning did : snowden looked at what he was leaking and claims he kept stuff that would harm the US. ( he still supports what Manning did).
this is the problem Manning literally did not read the classified information he was releasing and given his obligation to protect sensitive information and knowing that in some cases information was classified to protect lives( e.g informant names), his actions were morally reckless. if he had leaked just the collateral murder video , the he would have been justified.
Further, the exclusion of possible war crimes is setting up a false equivalence. It is the crux of the situation, determines motive, and is the fundamental point of the release. Removing that, changes the situation enough that it is no longer a good comparison or rough equivalence.
> “There is value in deterrence, your honor; this court
> must send a message to any soldier contemplating stealing
> classified information,” said Capt. Joe Morrow, a
> military prosecutor.
As I posted just recently [1], research has consistently shown deterrence has at best a minor effect. Other personal values and environmental factors are better predictors of noncompliance.
See, e.g., the best review article I've seen on neutralization theory [2][3].
Even if deterrence had a significant effect, surely it's totally immoral to punish one person for the potential future crimes of others? I don't understand how anyone can accept the idea of deterrence when deciding sentencing terms. Either the crime is bad enough to warrant a significant punishment, or it's not and therefore unnecessary to deter anyone else from committing the same crime.
No, this is the Armed Forces code of conduct. He broke the laws of his organization, was before a court of that same org. This is internal. Once you wear a uniform, other rules apply. secrecy has a different impact, loyalty as well.
Civilians might not like it or even understand, but Manning hopefully did when he chose to join the Armed Forces.
Snowden is different, just a contractor. But Manning joined the club, broke its rules. Knowingly. Hence a court martial. Not so long ago he would have been executed for it, 35 is a soft ruling.
After WW2, the Allies condemned and executed a number of German and Japanese officers who had done little more than follow orders. What they had done was not against any laws at the time, and definitely within their organizations' code of conduct. I think that was a good thing because it established the principle that joining an organization does not absolve you from higher duties towards your fellow citizens or humanity at large. By exposing questionable decisions and arguably a number of war crimes, Manning broke his oath with the US Army but did a much greater service to the rest of us. By choosing to make an example out of his punishment, the US has struck a huge blow to its claims of moral superiority and American exceptionalism.
People in the military have the right, and legal duty, to refuse unlawful orders, including orders that violate the international laws of war.
They do not have the right to unilaterally decide to violate a lawful order because they think it is better for humanity at large. They do not have the right to expose classified information because they think it shouldn't be classified. They do not have the right to violate orders because they are stupid, or because they're bad policy.
They do not have the right to make those decisions because, in the US, the military is supposed to be entirely subordinate to the laws enacted by our elected officials. Not "subordinate as long as it's for the best overall." This is a good thing--when enough members of the military decide to do what's better for the country against the lawful orders of the elected government that they serve, we call it a coup.
Obviously there are grey areas. After all, the Nuremburg trials punished people for violating laws that didn't exist during the commission of the crimes. If Manning had, say, only released extremely strong evidence of war crimes, I might agree that hiding that evidence was itself unlawful. But he didn't--he released a giant trove of classified diplomatic cables and military logs. These may have been unnecessarily classified, but were not unlawfully classified. Releasing them put Manning firmly in the "violating lawful orders" camp.
>when enough members of the military decide to do what's better for the country against the lawful orders of the elected government that they serve, we call it a coup
I'm not disputing that Manning broke the laws of the military. But calling his actions an incipient coup is laughable. In a world in which the worst offenders at Abu Ghraib got ten years (and were released much sooner), sentencing him to 35 years (as a deterrent!) is a disgrace. I don't see how you can defend the laws and regulations of an organization where it's much better to commit a crime against humanity than to publicize one and err on the side of too much info.
> In a world in which the worst offenders at Abu Ghraib got ten years (and were released much sooner), sentencing him to 35 years (as a deterrent!) is a disgrace.
Does that mean that Manning doesn't deserve his sentence? If so, how?
> I don't see how you can defend the laws and regulations of an organization where it's much better to commit a crime against humanity than to publicize one and err on the side of too much info.
I hate this about Manning's supporters. He exposed a small amount of wrongdoing with his leaking. The majority of the stuff he leaked didn't show any kind of criminal behavior, and instead exposed internal communications by US govt officials for no legitimate purpose. These leaks damaged relationships with foreign governments and jeopardized the lives of people in foreign nations employed by or cooperating with the US.
Stop pretending that he was a selfless warrior for truth and justice.
> Does that mean that Manning doesn't deserve his sentence? If so, how?
Because it is immoral to remove a fellow human's freedom for lengthy periods of time unless absolutely necessary, when there is no other way to protect the public from their future actions. For example, in the case of unreformable violent criminals, who must be physically restrained lest they injure others if unrestrained, there may be no other option than multiyear or even (in rare cases) multi-decade imprisonment. But that does not happen often, and even most people who committed violent crimes pose much less risk once they grow older.
There is no way you would be sentenced to 35 years for a nonviolent crime here (Denmark), because the idea is preposterous. Not even if you leaked something that offended the fairly influential and US/NATO-loving military. Sentences longer than 2 years are rare, reserved only for extreme crimes (murder, rape, etc.), which seems quite correct.
Americans seems somewhat vengeful, even sadistic on the subject, rather than rational. Somehow absurdly long sentences like confining someone in a cage for 5 years or even 10 years is seen as a "short" sentence, I guess because compared to locking people in a cage for 30 or 50 years or outright killing them, it seems lenient in comparison. You even hear people joking gleefully about prison rape. Not sure how you could approach fixing that culture.
>He exposed a small amount of wrongdoing with his leaking. [...] These leaks damaged relationships with foreign governments and jeopardized the lives of people
Abu Ghraib also damaged international relations and placed American lives at increased risk from terrorism. Plus, you know, it involved physically torturing people, not chatting online with Julian Assange.
Yet it is only Manning's crime that's judged worthy of deterrence (by a 3.5 times larger punishment). That's because his real fault is that of exposing the inner workings of a style of policy making that can only function effectively as long as the public is kept ignorant. Only this kind of a crime can "undermine the entire system", as the prosecutor very frankly put it.
Abu Ghraib may have embarrassed America, but the real no-no is exposing its government.
No, Manning's real crime to the military is disregarding orders and showing his own judgement.
Abu Ghraib was horrific, but it was close enough to what was ordered to be done by Mi, by the CIA, by special forces (water boarding, walling, stress positions, sleep deprivation) that no one thinks the soldiers really disregarded the chain of command (aside from the standing orders against prisoner treatment which others were by direct order ignoring), they just got out of hand. So from the military's point of view, it's not a discipline problem.
Abu Ghraib, as a systemic thing, is deterred by simple never issuing orders to do that kind of thing again and making it explicitly clear that it's prohibited. After all, non of the soldiers involved thought they were explicitly disobeying their superiors, they thought they were doing what everyone else did. If ordered not to torture people, they would not torture people.
Manning, on the other head, disregarded lawful orders stemming from the civilian command authority to protect information. He didn't do it because what he leaked exposed crimes against humanity(he leaked far more than leak the "collateral murder" video), he did it because he thought he knew what was best.
Soldiers don't get to decide what they think is best with in the context of lawful orders. If they could, they might decide they know what is best for the country and stage a coup, or frag their commanding officer, or any number of other things.
I'd be interested in seeing such studies, especially the methodology. The Taliban themselves were quite clear that they would be on the hunt for any and all collaborators, and there are eyewitness accounts of foreign service agents who had to be rapidly withdrawn from their post (sometimes in the middle of the night while literally out in a field) due to their name being revealed in these leaks.
And no offense, but what is the simplest explanation here? That a bunch of collaborator names were leaked and not a single person was put into harm's way as a result of that? Keep in mind that we're not talking about some random subdivision of the IRS, we're talking about the organization that gunned down Malala and detonated a bomb in the middle of a policeman's funeral.
The very fact that lowly private Manning had access to this stuff should tell you that the intelligence services of literally any country in the world have access to this.
The system is only effective at hiding information from citiziens, who are not able to access the very information that politicians use to guide their decisions. That is, of course, why they happily go on record with blatant lies, at no risk of being exposed. Contrast this with their complete non-statements in this current NSA situation; they would rather make no statement at all than be exposed as a liar, for no one knows what else Snowden/Greenwald will release that could make previous statements look like disinformation.
The latter, of course. Humans are imperfect. Humans know that they are imperfect. Humans know that other people recognize their imperfections. Life goes on because we don't rub in each others' faces what we think of each others' imperfections. Sometimes it's necessary in cases where a particular imperfection is becoming a serious issue either in the persons life or in the friendship, but generally the best policy is to leave things be.
I love every single one of my friends dearly and would go to great lengths for them. But for any one I can point to a list of things that are flawed about them, and I'm sure every one of them could put together a long list of things flawed about me. I'd be pissed at someone who told one of my friends that, e.g. I thought they had unrealistic expectations about potential mates given their own looks, because the only reason someone would do that would be to either hurt my friend or to hurt me.
Human relationships are very often about delicacy, and part and parcel of delicacy is knowing what thoughts to share and what not to share. When someone takes away that discretion and makes that decision for you, you are entitled to get mad.
Read some Eric Berne books. Human interactions are practically built on pretense and games (and it is not always bad - actually, unless you are caught up in a self-destructive game, it often is good). Unless you're communicating with robots all day, truth is not exactly the primary factor here. Otherwise morning greeting would look like:
- I notice you! Here's some meaningless words acknowledging the fact.
- I noticed you too. Please don't tell me anything about your life unless it's exciting but not making me envy you in any way.
- Same to you, and please don't waste my time anymore now unless you are going to benefit me in some way.
- I'm going to depart now, and I don't care how the rest of you day goes.
- Neither do I for you.
I would submit a world like this would be perceived as utterly bizarre by most of us.
I'm not married, but I doubt that I would tell her everything. That's not what I have an issue with. My issue is with the idea that society is some brittle construct that's reliant on honesty, and especially the idea that you would be angry at the person who leaked a secret rather than the person holding the secret.
>My issue is with the idea that society is some brittle construct that's reliant on (dis)honesty, and especially the idea that you would be angry at the person who leaked a secret rather than the person holding the secret.
Well, I am sorry to say that in fact society is that brittle and you are being lied to in one fashion or another most of the time.
I do want to clarify what I mean by lying though because it would be easy to interpret what I am saying as conspiratorial. In fact what I mean is that your information diet is nearly completely full with selective information, weasel words, legalese and implied trust. The constructs between nations and even within our nation are the same and often worse than interpersonal relations. So the reason that you trust any entity is not because they are moral pillars, its because they don't show you the questionable things that people do on a day to day basis that make little difference. This is exactly the argument against the widespread intelligence gathering - everyone is doing something illegal at pretty much any time. Similarly everyone, whether they know it or not lies to others on a daily basis (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/homo-consumericus/201111...)
So yes, it really is that fragile and it is insanely magnified at the global politics level way beyond you would even imagine.
I would love to see that happen, but I don't think we can handle it from a biological perspective. We are too emotional, vain and have too muddled an understanding of our own goals and volition to be able to be honest even with ourselves let alone the rest of the world. It just doesn't seem feasible without some kind of widespread cognitive change.
In Europe we used to think that killing each other over some differences is a good idea. Two wars later, around 10% population lost and look how well we get along.
We used to like having slaves. All people used to hate gays and atheists. Women used to be perceived as incapable of having public lives.
At some point we might reach the conclusion that being lied to is not all that convenient because truth eventually comes out and if it's too far from perception it leads to shitstorms.
People can change. But they do not change by themselves. There is always some kind of technological advancement that forces people to change their ways. I sincerely hope that internet will lead us to more honest lives.
Indeed you are correct that the truth will come out and I am the first person to support full transparency. I do know however that in this example, if the Japanese said they don't know what they are doing, please help - the people in charge would lose their jobs immediately. So it's not just a one way street with people being honest, it is also the public and everyone who has a voice understanding that there is a difference between incompetence, hostile intent and accidents.
People at the basic level demand perfection from people in power - so those in power do everything that they can to make it look like they are either infallible, or are victims. In one way or another how we as a society respond to failure that will determine how truthful we can be. If we continue to have the zero fault mindset for those in power, they will continue to lie.
"If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear"
Or I forget how the quote goes, but anyways I thought we supported the concept of privacy in general on this site. Governments need privacy to serve the interests of their people for the same reason people need privacy to serve their own interest.
Government should operate in the open. I might understand need for military secrecy of government of a small country in unfriendly region, but not for a broad secrecy of the government that has has largest military force in the world at its disposal. Unless you think that all this NSA thing is all good because government needs to have its privacy when it's spying you.
From what I heard relationships with foreign governments were damaged by the fact that foreign governments found out that friendly diplomacy called them chumps behind their backs. When the truth about this talk and how american diplomats understand words "friend" or "ally" leaked out it did hurt. As I said, if revealing what you really think about others hurts you, that's not a good sign. It's a sign that you might be kind of an asshole.
Are you sure you want everybody know all the truth about you? Every fine detail, including your bathroom routine, your most secret thoughts, your dreams and your secret wishes? Does the word "privacy" mean anything to you?
Yes, knowing the whole truth sometimes hurts. Some truths are not meant to be known by everybody.
I imagine they'r referring to the video of a helicopter shooting someone in Iraq who turned out to be holding a camera rather than a rocket launcher, which Wikileaks released under the title 'Collateral murder.'
If you ask me the real war crime is that the administration we had at the time went to war in Iraq in the first place, based on an apparent mixture of personal animus between Presidents Bush & Hussein and an alarmingly thin piece of social engineering by an Iraqi criminal/defector known as 'Curveball' who wanted to (at best) destabilize the Saddam Hussein regime or (at worst, but quite understandably) evade prison in Iraq. This entirely optional conflict led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, or by some counts >1 million, while (IMHO) significantly prolonging the war in Afghanistan by turning that theater into a sideshow.
I don't think Manning's information releases revealed very much about the war in Iraq other than to shed light on this particular helicopter incident which I think falls rather short of being a war crime, although I do think it was worth bringing to public attention.
On the other hand, I see no public benefit whatsoever in teh release of all the State Department cables, and as far as I can make out Manning took them and Assange released them just because they were classified by default. When their full contents became available because of carelessness with the crypto key outcome was some diplomatic red faces but there sure wasn't any big reveal of criminal activity.
Had he stopped at just the video I would be on his side. He didn't. He let loose 700,000 pages of documents that he shouldn't have and didn't need to do. He deserves the jail time.
That's roughly where I stand, though I don't think he deserves as much jail time, will get early parole, and was mistreated during his pretrial detention.
I'd grant him the information relating to the Granai airstrike as well. But on the other hand he wasn't facing jail time for that anyways; the judge had found him not guilty of that one.
> I don't see how you can defend the laws and regulations of an organization where it's much better to commit a crime against humanity than to publicize one and err on the side of too much info.
Abu Ghraib was a war crime, not a crime against humanity.
Abu Ghraib a crime against humanity? Yes, that's similar to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. That's nearly exactly the same thing as the genocide in Rwawanda. That's definitely on the same level as Pol Pot.
The difference however is Abu Ghraib didn't put intelligence sources at risk, it didn't endanger the lives of people. How many people died in Abu Ghraib from being photographed with underwear on their head? How many innocent lives were put at risk because of Abu Ghraib? I am certainly not defending the soldiers involved in that situation but to try and draw some moral relativism between the two cases is absurd. You likely have no idea how Americans are treated by the Taliban and Al Q when they're captured.
By the way, the guys in Abu were fighting on the same side as the guys that beheaded Daniel Pearl. They were combatants. They weren't innocent little girls walking to school. The irony is if the US soldiers at Abu had shot those prisoners on the battlefield, nobody would have complained, but they put underwear on their heads and the world freaks the hell out, yet quietly forgetting about cases like Daniel Pearl. We could argue Geneva convention all day long, but until the Taliban is a signatory to that convention or wears uniforms declaring themselves as part of a legitimate military force, the Geneva Conventions never applied, though of course we (meaning the US military) still follow those rules. And those that didn't -- were punished.
One specific and direct result of Manning is the case of Shakil Afridi, the doctor in Pakistan that helped find Bin Laden. He's in a Pakistan prison for 30 years after ostensibly being tortured.
Since Mr. Manning directly made his discovery possible, what punishment should Manning receive? There are dozens and dozens of intelligence sources and relationships that were significantly harmed because of Manning.
If you have ever spent any time with a security clearance, you'd know that there are countless unintended consequences that result from revealing a source or a collection method. Being morally outraged over Bradley Manning puts you in the same shoes as a Taliban sympathizer because not only was Manning a soldier, sworn to uphold the Constitution, the lives of his fellow soldiers, allies and others were in his hands. He was given a position of public trust and the responsibility that goes with it. Yet because he had emotional and personal problems he chose to do what he did.
A raw information dump isn't "blowing the whistle," it's an intent to inflict harm on the United States and allies. If you wanted to expose a security hole in Gmail, for example, you wouldn't expose every single gmail user's information. You'd expose the amount necessary to reveal the problem. The simple truth is that Manning is a kid, he's intelligent to some degree, but he certainly isn't an Edward Snowden. Manning had no idea what he was doing. By his own words he said he didn't intend to harm the United States. Either he's a liar or a complete fool.
There are countless intelligence and diplomatic relationships that have been harmed, in addition to people who have been directly killed, captured or targeted as a result of Manning.
Snowden on the other hand, released information about illegal activities against US citizens that were in direct violation of the law. The Snowden releases, while potentially compromising national security from a strategic standpoint, didn't put any lives at direct risk. Manning's releases however put dozens of people directly in the line of fire. I am not going to defend Snowden, however a better case could be made for him than Manning and certainly no comparison could be made to Abu Ghraib. That's just tomfoolery.
>You likely have no idea how Americans are treated by the Taliban and Al Q when they're captured [... T]he guys in Abu were fighting on the same side as the guys that beheaded Daniel Pearl. [... I]f the US soldiers at Abu had shot those prisoners on the battlefield, nobody would have complained, but they put underwear on their heads and the world freaks the hell out
Your obsession with terrorists' lack of scruples is causing you to become what you hate. You think it's OK to humiliate and torture them because they're terrorists, they think it's OK to behead us because of religion and nationality. How about a little show of strength and dealing with them without lowering to their level?
>>> Your obsession with terrorists' lack of scruples is causing you to become what you hate
Did it? Did he already cut off people's heads, blow up markets and issued fatwas calling for murdering infidels? Or did he just express an opinion that maybe war prisoner abuse, while being undeniably bad, is not the same as murdering innocent people or perpetrating genocide? If in your eyes that makes one the same as terrorist, your priorities are seriously messed up.
They didn't say it was OK to humiliate or torture people, so stop drawing your own conclusion on that please. They said it was not morally equivalent to an actual war crime, especially the kind that got people put in the dock at Nürnberg.
At risk of what? What was already happening to both soldiers and civilians? You can't mean torture, death, or imprisonment. Hell, the Taliban and the like were doing far, far worse already.
So, I'm honestly curious, what was the increased risk?
> so maybe you made some good points later on.
The OP made mention of how Manning's leak directly led to intelligence sources imprisonment and death.
I wonder if there is anything other than suspicious backing up your claims here?
Gee, I dunno. I'm no great military strategist or anything, but it seems like allowing the Taliban to establish the ground rules isn't the best approach.
For one thing, not all of the US's potential adversaries are radical Islamists. In future conventional wars, we will need the moral authority to demand that our prisoners be treated in accordance with international laws and treaty obligations. Debacles like Abu Ghraib -- to say nothing of the Iraq war in general -- rob us of that moral authority, in much the same way that the Roman Catholic Church loses some of its moral authority every time another child sex abuse case comes to light. To occupy the high ground, you must first take it.
The OP made mention of how Manning's leak directly led to intelligence sources imprisonment and death.
No, orchestrating a bogus public health campaign led to Afridi's imprisonment. As far as I'm concerned, Afridi can take his place next to Mengele in medical infamy.
Manning did an unalloyed good thing in bringing the CIA's tactic to light [1]. I want foreign operatives to tell the Agency to fuck off when they come up with ideas like, "Hey, let's start a vaccination program so we can subvert the local populace and find our bad guy."
You seem to think that the ends justify the means. That's great, as long as you have perfect knowledge of future consequences. In that sense, both the US government and Bradley Manning made the same logical error. The difference is, his actions had some positive consequences as well as negative ones.
[1]: If, in fact, he did. There seems to be some disagreement with briandear's (lack of a) citation on this.
>>>> In future conventional wars, we will need the moral authority to demand that our prisoners be treated in accordance with international laws and treaty obligations.
A little wrinkle here is that most US adversaries in recent wars didn't give a flying duck about US moral authority. And there's no reason why that would change - it's not like US is going to war with Sweden or Canada. Not that supposedly civilized countries aren't capable of mass atrocities - look at what Germans did in 20th century. Did they care for the moral authority of the Jews they mass-murdered? I highly doubt so.
Moral authority is important only for US and only because winning the war while destroying one's society may not be worth it.
>>>> The difference is, his actions had some positive consequences as well as negative ones.
You mean, actions of US government don't have positive consequences? I think you're getting way ahead of the facts here.
For you, maybe. Some would think removal of homicidal maniac dictator that openly paid terrorists, invaded neighboring countries, used chemical weapons, mass-murdered his own population and bribed top functionaries of the UN[1] to look other way is some upside. But I guess who cares what foreigners do to foreigners, there are billions of them anyway.
Changing the topic, are you? I take it as an implicit admission you were wrong implying there were no positive effects of US policy at all. It is good that you realize now you overreached, hopefully next time you'd use less hyperbole and recognize that you can't just ignore facts you don't like.
In the specific case of soldiers in Iraq, at risk of radicalisation of that part of the population which, prior to the events at Abu Ghraib and them becoming known in Iraq (which occurred before they were leaked in the West), had been supportive (or at least tolerant) of the occupation.
For the rest of the military, a greater risk of hostile populations and bigger psyops advantages for adversaries in foreign operations.
> How many innocent lives were put at risk because of Abu Ghraib?
Depends on how you define innocent, but given WMD was a false pretence, and regime change the moral justification retreat position, torture and prisoner abuse at the same site as the former regime is pretty damning. I would say a lot of lives were put at risk by this change in 'optics'.
EDIT: I misread, thinking you meant injured or killed. It just hurt relationships, I think that point is fairly hard to argue. Sure, it hurt relationships. I'd say Abu Ghraib looms larger in their consciousness than the leaks that took place though.
> Being morally outraged over Bradley Manning puts you in the same shoes as a Taliban sympathizer because not only was Manning a soldier
Echoes of GWB: you are either with us or against us. Most people have the maturity to rise above this simplistic level of thinking.
> How many innocent lives were put at risk because of Abu Ghraib?
further to what I wrote above:
On April 20, 2004 insurgents fired forty (40) mortar rounds into the prison. Twenty-two detainees were killed and 92 wounded. Commentators thought the attack was either as an attempt to incite a riot or retribution for detainees' cooperating with the United States.[6]
reasonable to surmise shelling was to stop or prevent information being given up under torture.
So wait, now US soldiers must take the blame for one set of terrorists killing other terrorists to prevent the latter from talking? Maybe also the police is to blame when Mafia is killing witnesses? Abu Ghraib abuses are bad, but it looks like you're losing perspective here and try to paint every wrong being done as US fault, no matter who did it or why.
Blame isn't as black and white as you are making out.
If the police have a duty of care to witnesses, and the Mafia kill them, then the police should take some blame. Not as much as the mafia. Think of a witness protection program, if they fail at their task then they are partially to blame.
So no, I am not trying to paint it all as being US' fault, you can tell that because I wrote "insurgents fired".
You wrote "insurgents fired" but also you wrote that "innocent lives" (supposedly talking about imprisoned terrorists) are at risk because of what happened in Abu Ghraib and brought other terrorists firing as an example. SO you laid the blame not on terrorists that fired but on US forces that captured the terrorists.
"Abu Ghraib a crime against humanity? Yes, that's similar to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. That's nearly exactly the same thing as the genocide in Rwawanda. That's definitely on the same level as Pol Pot."
Right, then, so you're fine with me murdering you as long as I don't torture you first? Better than the worst is not good enough.
"Manning's releases however put dozens of people directly in the line of fire."
Everyone keeps saying this. Can you explain how it is that the Army and the Obama administration, who have unparalleled interest in seeing Manning discredited and have gone to great lengths to do so, have so far failed to uncover a single instance of Manning's releases actually harming a human being?
The US government, through various means, seems to be intent on removing from public discourse the very information needed for those in uniform to properly assess the legality of their orders. Also, in case they forgot, the Constitution is the Law, and if Manning saw that the government was violating the Constitution, I don't think it's wrong for him to expose such wrongdoing. That's the very definition of whistleblowing. And, to those who claim that he should have pursued his whistleblowing through established military channels, I would reply that the US government, the Military, as well as other agencies, seem intent on keeping the truth from the American People, so it is entirely reasonable to expect that the military and other agencies in the government would attempt to disallow the whistleblower's efforts.
OK, and what unconstitutional activity was revealed by the release of many thousands of State Department cables? I mean, it's all very well to say that Manning saw the government was violating the Constitution, but I would like some specific examples of what he revealed. Abuses such as the operation of Abu Ghraib were not exposed by Manning.
Manning joined the Army in late 2007/early 2008, by which time the US had been involved in what a lot of people (including myself) consider to have been an illegal war in Iraq for 4-5 years; one in which the existence of appalling human rights abuses such as torture and extraordinary rendition were well documented, and which by then was well understood by the public to have been predicated on faulty intelligence.
It seems to me that if you have a negative view of war and militarism, then you should probably not join the organization involved in fighting that war in the first place. You could serve your country perfectly well and without taking part in military aggression by, say, joining the Coast Guard.
Frankly, I think the only reason Manning has hero status on HN is because he was a computer nerd, and so other computer nerds are willing to suspend their critical faculties because they can identify with him. I can identify with him up to a point, but not to the point of wanting to join the army 5 years into a clusterfuck like the Iraq war run by an administration that had tossed things like the Geneva convention out the window.
Well, that's the million dollar question isn't it? Should the State be allowed to keep this much stuff secret and still expect the Voting Public to accurately measure the effectiveness of government officials?
No, that's a totally different question. I asked what unconstitutional activity was revealed by all of those state department cables that were leaked. As best I can ascertain, the answer is 'none whatsoever.'
Be more specific. There were 250,000 cables and it was several years ago, I don't remember any about us torturing people or about extraordinary rendition, but I'm happy to be corrected. I certainly don't remember any big smoking gun.
Information about Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was revealed in 2004 by the Department of Defense itself pursuant to its own investigation. Information about waterboarding (which as far as I am concerned is illegal torture) was widely available and the subject of intense public discussion in 2007, before Manning even joined the army.
People in the military have the right, and legal duty, to refuse unlawful orders, including orders that violate the international laws of war.
So if they witness a crime, they should speak out. Manning did release evidence of several crimes leading up to and during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:
The cheerful murder of Reuters journalists and later innocents who came to help by that helicopter crew
The purchase of child prostitutes for entertainment by Dyncorp
The illegal collection of DNA from UN officials and representatives (straight from Dr. Strangelove!)
etc.
Now as you say he also released a lot of other material, which wasn't directly related to any crime, so he should expect to be punished for that indiscriminate release, and it weakens his case, but I'd also expect some clemency given that the release was clearly in the public interest and revealed many unlawful orders and coverups.
I don't think he deserves 35 years for that, compared to the 6 months sentence of Sgt. Sabrina Harman who tortured and abused detainees, it seems disproportionate.
With regards to your first "crime":
How was that a murder? The unit on the ground received RPG fire, and the person was holding a large object and pointing at ground forces. What do you think is going to happen? For them to come down out of the helicopter and ask for the press pass? When you say murder you imply that the service men had the intent to kill some journalist. When in reality they thought they had weapons pointed at a previously attacked ground force, and had the helicopter crew asked permission to engage and protect the ground force.
In the first "crime"... No crime was committed nor was anyone ever convicted. It was a tragic result, but not one that the reporters could have mitigated the risk.
It's a difficult case, and I understand why you see it as a tragic mistake, but I don't think the helicopter crew were sufficiently diligent in checking who they were going to kill, particularly in the aftermath of the first shots where people tried to help the wounded, and were then mown down. Just because someone was armed, doesn't make them an enemy (they could be for example a bodyguard for journalists), and just because someone tries to give medical assistance to others in a battle, doesn't mean they also need to be killed. Their callous reaction to the news that children were in the van having just killed their father demonstrates their lack of care.
At the very least Reuters should have been provided with this footage (instead it was covered up), and an independent investigation held.
> but I'd also expect some clemency given that the release was clearly in the public interest and revealed many unlawful orders and coverups.
The chain of command issuing the unlawful orders and participating in the coverups is unlikely to agree that revealing those things is in the "public interest".
Which is kind of the fundamental problems that whistleblowers always face (whether or not formal protections are in place) -- the people deciding whether or not to punish them (or whether or not the protections apply) are often the people on whom they are "blowing the whistle", or at least people with shared interest with the targets of the whistleblowing.
This is mitigated when there is involvement of an independent actor in the process, but in the case of military trials that are completely within the military chain of command within the executive branch, that kind of independence is hard to find.
The military trials of which you speak deal with military penal code as set out by Congress, not by the President. Likewise the trials are overseen in the end by the civilian Supreme Court.
In the actual military the untoward influence (real or perceived) of the convening officer on the outcome of the case is a B.F.D., just witness all the sexual assault/harassment cases that were being upended by Obama's condemnation of servicemembers who engage in them. In fact SECDEF himself had to issue a memo saying, in effect, that the POTUS expects trial members/judges to use their own independent judgment when considering the facts of a case, just as specified in the M.C.M.
You're right that an independent actor is what is needed in general, but Col. Lind does not report to the President on this, she reports to the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, which is a completely separate chain of command from the one that was issuing orders relating actions in Iraq of Afghanistan.
> The military trials of which you speak deal with military penal code as set out by Congress, not by the President
Passing the laws is not being part of the process of applying them (its also inaccurate to say that the UCMJ is "set out by Congress, not the President", since the current version of the UCMJ wasn't adopted over a Presidential veto.)
> Likewise the trials are overseen in the end by the civilian Supreme Court.
Which, given the length (both procedurally and temporally) of the appeal chain is a far more distant involvement of a non-executive actor than is the case in civilian trials.
> You're right that an independent actor is what is needed in general, but Col. Lind does not report to the President on this, she reports to the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington
The existence of intervening steps on the chain of command does not make a military officer independent of the Commander-in-Chief.
When you join the military, you take an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies "foreign and domestic" (emphasis mine)
That's first. Obeying lawful orders is second.
It's debatable how this oath applies in Manning's case, but I think it's rather telling what order the things you are swearing to uphold come in.
When I was in the military my interpretation was that anything I was ordered to do that was contrary to the Constitution was an unlawful order. If I were taking the oath seriously, that would have required active dissent, not just ignoring the order.
What happens when every soldier feels within their rights to determine who the domestic enemies of the Constitution are, and takes unprecedented action against those enemies?
Did Manning reveal anything that was prima facie unconstitutional?
If the US wasn't breaking its own Constitution all the time, this wouldn't be even a problem. PRISM for that example breaks 4th, 5th and probably 9th Amendment. That's about a third of the Bill of Rights. Each and every NSA employee is under Oath to protect the Constitution. And then a person who tries just doing that (Snowden) is the one called traitor!
If not for things like PRISM the military and other branches of the Government wouldn't need to worry about soldiers/their employees reporting unconstitutional actions of the Government. Because it seems they break the law all the time, yes, that's a problem. The Governments problem not whistleblowers.
Let me illustrate my point a little bit differently: you are a teacher at school. And there is this student Adam that constantly gets into trouble. On Monday he had a fight. On Tuesday he was absent on Math. On Wednesday he was calling names a younger girl from different class. Then on Thursday you find out that somebody broke window in a classroom. Are you surprised Adam is suspected?
Manning probably assumed that there must be some illegal stuff in the cables/documentation he revealed. And some documents show he was right.
So, the USG, similarly to Adam from my example has worked long and hard for its reputation. Don't blame some teachers/whistleblowers for suspecting usual suspects.
You are confusing wrongdoers here. All the wars are unconstitutional to begin with because Congress didn't declare them.
While you probably already know this, others may not: there is an organization called the Oath Keepers which is comprised of current and former uniformed members of military and civil services who affirm what you've stated - that the oath they took was first and foremost to defend the Constitution.
Oath Keepers is a non-partisan association of current and formerly serving military, reserves, National Guard, veterans, Peace Officers, and Fire Fighters who will fulfill the Oath we swore, with the support of like minded citizens who take an Oath to stand with us, to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, so help us God. Our Oath is to the Constitution.
Doesn't it seem a bit dumb to require them to refuse unlawful orders, but also forbid them from determining for themselves what is "unlawful" so they have to rely on their superiors (who are the ones giving the orders in the first place)? Or they can be stuck with "my government says this order is lawful (and will do bad things to me if I refuse it), the people we're fighting say it's unlawful (and if they win will do bad things to me if I don't refuse it)".
They are not forbidden from determining that a given order is lawful or not.
However they are trained that the presumption is that a given order is lawful unless it's clearly contrary to the Constitution, law, regulation or policy.
As we phrase it in the Navy, no sailor has ever been court-martialed for following a legitimate order, but the same cannot be said regarding mutiny.
In short if you want to challenge an order go right ahead, but realize that your ass is going to be put on the line and even the Supreme Court will be biased on the military's side regarding it, if previous experience is any judge.
"They do not have the right to unilaterally decide to violate a lawful order because they think it is better for humanity at large."
What you should say is,
"They will be prosecuted if they unilaterally decide to violate a lawful order, even if they think it is better for humanity at large."
And I would add, "And sometimes duty to humanity will compel them to accept that they will be prosecuted, and they have to unilaterally decide what is right."
> when enough members of the military decide to do what's better for the country against the lawful orders of the elected government that they serve, we call it a coup.
No, we call it a mutiny.
A coup is specifically when the action they take involves displacing the lawful government, not merely disobeying its orders.
They do have the right to do so, and in fact we expect them to independently evaluate it.
But much like a court of law, the presumption is that the order is lawful if given by proper authority, and the servicemember must then prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the order is unlawful, and be willing to take the risk of court-martial if they are wrong.
It also somewhat depends on the community you're in. Enlisted nuclear technicians on submarines probably disobey an order every other day at least, to keep an EOOW (or ENG) from doing something stupid to their nuclear propulsion plant.
Exactly. The stubborn application of law is not justice. It is authoritarianism, which Wikipedia defines as "a form of government as well as a personality and social trait [that] is characterized by absolute or blind obedience to authority, as against individual freedom and related to the expectation of unquestioning obedience."
It seems people are quick to point out that Manning broke some rules, but are too narrow-minded to look up and see the big picture. Manning undeniably made a service to the greater good, which is the good of his country. Whether he broke some rules internal to his organization should not even have come into play in this trial.
I feel like you're fighting a different battle than the one that exists. One in which Manning uncovered and released targeted evidence of clear war crimes, instead of a bunch of unflattering information along with some evidence that was at best ambiguous and at most showed bad judgment on the part of some soldiers.
> The stubborn application of law is not justice. It is authoritarianism
No it's not. The stubborn application of the law is called "rule of law" and it's the foundation of the political theory coming out of Enlightenment liberalism. Authoritarian governments are characterized by personalistic/charismatic rule, and the use of fiat/decree in the place of pre-existing legal standards.
Bradley Manning knowingly violated a long-standing law in the military code of justice that he was fully aware of since signing up. Applying the law to Manning is an example of rule of law not authoritarianism.
This trial was political: people vs. government. The government won by not upsetting the people "too much" by giving him a "light" sentence of only 35 years (what a deal). He will lose 5 years of his life for the service of the greater good.
"The stubborn application of law is not justice. It is authoritarianism, which Wikipedia defines as [...]"
That is super stupid. You don't understand authoritarianism, then, citations of Wikipedia aside. You do a disservice to the actual victims of authoritarianism.
EDIT: Look at the downvoting.. and this is nice compared to what I wrote at first. Since I'm already -3, I'll remove the politeness filters and say that this comment is idiotic. Stubborn application of the law is authoritarianism? How is that not the dumbest thing written on the internet today. Perhaps I'm the stupid one for believing that WORDS have MEANINGS beyond what is convenient at the moment. It's like people saying that food stamps are socialism. It's not opinion, it's INCORRECT.
It sounds like a totally reasonable definition to me. All you've done is to repeat over and over again that the definition is stupid, without identifying why it is stupid or how it could be improved. That's why you got downvoted, not because of your opinion.
Let's examine typical examples of authoritarianism: Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Franco, to name a few. Note these are people, not nations, yet they they instantaneously identifiable with the USSR, Cambodia, Chile, and Spain. This is a key aspect of authoritarianism - the origin of laws and their enforcement are from a person or cabal, not from the people of that nation. Dictatorship is not synonymous with authoritarianism, but they have a large overlap.
All of my examples are universally considered extremely immoral. However, there are also some countries that are mostly authoritarian, but are arguably not immoral (some middle eastern sultanates come to mind). There is an enormous body of though on the morality of laws. This starts in Greek time with Plato and The Republic, and has had contributions from Aquinas, Hobbes, and more recently MLK. A non-authoritarian state can easily pass immoral laws, too.
Finally, the degree of enforcement of law is a concept which I consider separate from the system of government and the particular laws of the society.
So my objection is that the post commingled three separate ideas: the origin of law within a society, the morality of law, and the rigor of law enforcement. I think the commingling was incorrect. I think some of this is so obvious that not recognizing it can be fairly characterized as stupid. Hope that I hope that clarifies things.
To offer my opinion, the US is not close to being an authoritarian state. However, it has some immoral laws. That can be rectified via a democratic process. I think the enforcement of those laws in this case was actually fairly lax, because he clearly committed crimes and it would not have been difficult to have made a case for treason which would have been eligible for capital punishment, as another commenter noted.
Much more useful. I would point out, however, that many people have begun to wonder whether bad laws can truly be rectified through a democratic process at this point. I am of the opinion that we have, or will soon, hit a sort of tipping point beyond which changing bad laws becomes unfeasible. At that point, aren't we essentially ruled by a cabal of economic and political elites, pushing us into the realm of "authoritarianism"?
I think the entire concept of an entire body of law without a single bad law is implausible on its face. We can't even get computers to do "good things" in all situations and they do exactly what we tell them to and obey what are essentially very simple rules.
So the question shouldn't be "why hasn't the democratic process rectified bad laws", but rather "is there a better process than the democratic process for rectifying bad laws"? I know this sounds like Churchill, but it's also a bit of Gödel if you think about it.
I created it to allow myself a different degree of expression from my normal account. Sometimes I just want to release my id - say, for engaging with a not-unsubstantial population on HN of people whose intellect doesn't keep pace with their arrogance. I still try to be constructive and take care of as though it was a primary account. But I really don't care about karma/points. The account is serving precisely the purpose it was created for.
What a bunch of pedantic garbage. The Japanese were willing to commit to total war to defend their right to conquer and massacre Chinese people and Pacific islanders and surprise-bomb the USA while they were at it. The only significant debate about the A-Bomb is whether it was more or less deadly than an invasion of mainland Japan. Any fourth grade history student would understand this.
When people talk about the decline of HN, I think it's this sort of information-free, pointlessly contrary posts that they talk about.
> What a bunch of pedantic garbage. [ ] Any fourth grade history student would understand this. [ ] When people talk about the decline of HN, I think it's this sort of information-free, pointlessly contrary posts that they talk about.
If you have a valid point, why do you need to resort to incivility?
> The Japanese were willing to commit to total war to defend their right to massacre Chinese people; the USA took them up on the offer. The only significant debate about the A-Bomb is whether it was more or less deadly than an invasion of mainland Japan.
So you actually think that intentionally killing civilians to win a war is morally okay? I just don't hold that view.
Applying morals to war is really about maintaining your sanity/humanity, nothing more. It is all together too arbitrary to define into rules based on various moral structures. Risking oneself for a dying soldier is heroic in the western view, but from a bushido perspective was insanity. So very arbitrary.
Sure, I agree with this. Not everyone has the same morals, and it's hard to make them into rules. War essentially occurs in the absence of rules. However, that doesn't make all wartime conduct moral. If I were fighting, I would never kill an enemy civilian with the intent to display my strength. That's just because I consider this cowardice.
> So you actually think that intentionally killing civilians to win a war is morally okay? I just don't hold that view.
Even if the civilian deaths attributed to the A-bomb where less than that of a supposed land invasion?.
WW2 saw lots of that. Think of the bombing of Dresden when the Allies whipped out the city with incendiary bombs because it was a mayor city factory (ammo, etc.).
Yes, even then. Even if you could be sure that there would be more civilian deaths (which you really can't be), there is a big ethical difference between choosing to kill someone and being forced to do it.
No one "chose" to kill civilians at Hiroshima or Nagasaki though. The U.S. dropped leaflets all over both cities warning them of the bomb.
Either way by your logic firebombing attacks such as at Dresden or Tokyo would have been just fine (oh no, my bomb had to have hit a barracks, not a hospital!) even though they can't possibly all have been right. So it's not even true to say that conventional bombing wouldn't have killed civilians; every pilot who went on a bombing mission, conventional or nuclear, knew that they were killing civilians too.
And both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had actual military value, it's not as if either of them were resort villages. If the Japanese decide to put tons of civilian structure in between the military establishments then that's on them. Conventional bombing was so inaccurate that practically the only thing you'd be sure to hit while trying to bomb a military target is everything around it.... including the civilian establishments.
I'm actually kind of curious, are you okay with nuking cities in the future?
My point here was never that other war atrocities are somehow good. It's just my belief that intentionally killing unarmed civilians is murder, in a moral sense, irrespective of circumstance or nationality. If you must take out a military target and there are civilian casualties, then so be it, provided you did your best to minimize them. However, sprinkling some leaflets before dropping an atomic bomb is not doing your best to minimize casualties.
If a display of nuclear power as a deterrent was truly required to end the war, and it may well have been, I can think of numerous less deadly steps that could have been taken first. An aggressive warning strategy that comes to mind would be bombing the remote and relatively unpopulated mountainous regions of Japan.
> I'm actually kind of curious, are you okay with nuking cities in the future?
As a first strike, you mean? No, we have far more effective conventional military weapons that would obviate the need for the overkill that a nuclear strike would deliver.
They didn't have that in WWII though, which is the discussion everyone focuses on, and people always seem to conveniently ignore that the only thing stopping further American and Japanese bloodshed was ending the war ASAP.
To the extent that the A-bombs allowed to the Emperor to save face while still surrendering, those A-bombs saved untold hundreds of thousands or even millions of further Japanese lives, not to mention the cost in American (and Soviet!) casualties.
Actually, Japan were ready to throw in the towel as a result of the tripartite pact being enacted, and Russia joining the fray. Sakhalin was the trigger, and their worst fears were confirmed when the soviets raped and pillaged their way through the island, killing some 20,000 civvies. Atrocious.
They surrendered because of Stalin and his unending and brutal (and brutalised, the Red Army was not a happy place) cannon-fodder, not the bomb.
Nuking two civilian populations was unnecessary, barbaric, and inexcusable, and I'm afraid to say pointless.
A fourth grade history student would know exactly what you say. A heavily read historian would say something quite different - or agree. It's pretty divisive, but outside of the US the majority agree that the USSR caused the surrender.
Here's a pretty decent source on the topic - have only skimmed it, after writing this and wanting to back up my statements, but it's pretty balanced. http://www.japanfocus.org/-Tsuyoshi-Hasegawa/2501
> Actually, Japan were ready to throw in the towel as a result of the tripartite pact being enacted, and Russia joining the fray.
People say this a lot, but no one has clearly explained how the U.S.S.R. would have been able to stage an invasion of the Home Islands of Japan. It's not a matter of simply ferrying a bunch of people over the Trans-Siberian railroad, you also need a navy, sufficient air cover (which if I remember my geography correctly would have almost necessarily meant carrier-borne aircraft), and the logistics to back that all up. Japan knew this just as much then as we realize it now.
The Soviet gains after their entry into the war were in China and Korea, not in Japan itself. Their entrance into the war was earlier than expected on the Japanese's part, but they knew the U.S.S.R. would declare war (seriously, you may consider their senior and military leadership stupid, but that stupid?).
Likewise the attack on the Kwantung Army in China was surprising in that it came from every direction possible instead of the one direction they expected it from. But they knew the Soviets would attack, and in fact the attack fell while the Kwantung Army was changing positions to better guard the direction they believed the attack would actually come from.
So certainly the Soviet attack came as a shock, but it was militarily no more severe than any other setback to the Allies.
> but outside of the US the majority agree that the USSR caused the surrender.
Don't take this the wrong way, but what does an opinion poll have to do with whether some event actually happened in a given way or not? It either did or did not happen for the causes described. If the rest of the world has better evidence for their belief then point to the evidence, but don't point to an opinion poll as prima facie evidence of something.
In the event we have evidence on the Japanese side that the atomic bomb proved a useful "excuse" to permit the Emperor to surrender. The Japanese were clearly ready to fight to the death (just witness the Battle of Okinawa), and that applied just as much against the Red Army as it did against the Americans. So simply changing the uniform of the person holding the rifle wouldn't have significantly affected the strategic calculus when the Emperor had to explain his decision to his people.
On the other hand, the atomic bomb was this technological doomsday device that even the most hardened Japanese militant couldn't speak against. You couldn't fight it in the battlefield; you couldn't simply hunker down like a brave citizen and start picking up pieces after the bombs had been dropped, now there were no pieces left to pick up at all.
Japan had nothing like it, and as such it gave the Emperor a clear line of reasoning for why he had to (had to) surrender for the sake of his people. It was something completely different and from out of this world, as opposed to a simple Soviet declaration of war.
> It either did or did not happen for the causes described.
Well, whatever the actual reason for the surrender, any claims about it one way or the other are totally unfalsifiable. But, thanks for the historical analysis here nonetheless.
> Well, whatever the actual reason for the surrender, any claims about it one way or the other are totally unfalsifiable.
Fair enough. But the people with the best understanding of events as they were happening, were those actually making the decisions at the time.... and they decided to drop the bomb.
For years after that it's been 'backseat drivers' second-guessing that decision despite their own claims being totally unfalsifiable. While it might be nice to be able to look back on hindsight, no one had a crystal ball at the time, which is why it's inappropriate to pin decisions made in 1945 with the moral qualms of a generation that has never seen world-wide total war.
I guess I just project my own personal worldview onto world affairs. I do stupidly bad things with some frequency, and I only ever recognize them as such in hindsight. Nobody acts against their own morals at the time, right? But I believe it's helpful to say, "Look, I did a stupidly bad thing because I didn't feel or think I had any other options, and I wouldn't have done it if I'd known better." Einstein said as much when he wrote, "Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would not have lifted a finger."
We don't know if there could have been an alternative that definitively ended the war and cost less lives. Things were winding down at that point anyway. I don't even necessarily feel that dropping those bombs was a bad thing in the grand scheme of things, because it shone a light on the darkness that we are capable of as a species. Maybe those two bombs were all that prevented mutual destruction during the cold war.
But as an isolated event, nuking a city is just as horrific as pushing people into ovens - it's really quite comparable, actually - and I think it's best just to say, we did something awful, we thought we had to, it's over now, it won't happen again. Germany did this, for instance. And the only reason that didn't happen for the atomic bombs is because the US "won" the war.
Great insight, but I hope you don't think that Americans don't feel it was an awful, horrific action. It's considered exactly like you say, "something awful, but what choice did we have?".
"What choice did we have?" is very different from "We had choices but we lacked the perspective required to take them."
The first says, we did something bad, but it was justified, i.e. we didn't do anything morally wrong. The second says we did something bad, we thought it was justified, but it turns out that it was a mistake. Einstein is clearly expressing the latter, whereas official American policy expresses the former, and there has never been an apology.
So "perspective" is what's telling you to invade the islands and slaughter millions of civilians while causing millions of American casualties? Remember the goal here is to win the war that Japan started.
Presumably you have a proposed option to have done that without atomic weaponry and that the Americans should have recognized with the information available to them; what is that option?
First of all, I believe you're still missing my point, so maybe I need to be more clear. I'm fine with a simple "we didn't know better" since that's apologetic. That's not a falsehood even if it weren't possible for the Americans to know better; I'm willing to believe they acted in good faith on the best information they had. That's not even a falsehood even if there truly weren't any better options, which is of course impossible to know.
Instead you get "we did what we had to", which is unapologetic, and doesn't allow the possibility of there being better options. It basically comes down to admitting doubt vs. reinforcing belief (since asserting an unfalsifiable claim is a belief).
Nevertheless, I'm not convinced that invading Japan was the only alternative. I mentioned somewhere, perhaps not in reply to you, that dropping atomic bombs on remote regions of Japan would have demonstrated military superiority with far less casualties.
And another post in this thread linked to this article:
If you're actually really interested in this, and maybe you are since you're obviously interested in military stuff, I'm pretty sure there are entire bookcases filled with books and journal articles weighing the pros and cons of the decision to drop the bomb.
Winning the war is obviously the biggest factor in terms of who goes to the gallows.
But there's a difference between loss of life in combat versus deliberate murder of noncombatants outside of a combat situation or of prisoners who are in your care. It's not about who has the highest scorecard of death and depravity.
Ask the same question about incendiary bombing, which happened throughout the war. The B-29s dropping incendiaries on Tokyo killed more people than the atomic attacks. Are those pilots war criminals? Are the artillerymen who leveled towns and villages full of people war criminals? Based on the "total war" approach embraced in WW2, they were not.
Yeah, I only meant the atomic bombs, which was quite clearly "deliberate murder of noncombatants outside of a combat situation" as far as I can tell.
I mean, it was essentially, "We have unlimited capacity to randomly murder 100,000 of your civilians at once, we've demonstrated it twice now, so submit to our authority." Well, they did.
Dresden Bombings, Bombing of London, Tokyo Fire Bombings, Rape of Nanjing, take your pick, WWII was Total War in the closest sense of the Clausewitzian term, it was about breaking the will of a government (sometimes) and definitely it's people. The practice of protecting civilians of a foreign nation is really a western one rooted in chivalric code of conduct and to be fair, wasn't expected practice until fairly recently.
Well, what you can tell is wrong. The atomic bombs were horrific in their destructions and death toll, but not really any more than the conventional bombings. Even the Japanese didn't think much of Hiroshima based on that alone (they had gotten used to cities getting wiped out) and it took Nagasaki to make clear that this was really a game-changer.
Under the military doctrine of the day, the enemy's means of production were legitimate targets. That included industry, transit points, and other things associated with urban areas. The Japanese adopted a similar strategy, especially in China.
FYI I'm not personally advocating that obliterating cities is ok. I find it morally repugnant. I'm Just recounting the generally accepted standard of the time.
"Murder" is unlawful killing. Even if you believe in the existence of international law, it's not unlawful to kill civilians in the course of a bombing campaign in a declared war.
Nothing but a textbook example of Victor's Justice. Had the Japanese won, those trials would have taken place (well, executions at least, perhaps not trials).
Yeah, this was kind of my point about Manning, namely that justice is rather arbitrary and is transparently hypocritical at best. Nothing seriously bad happened to the people in the Collateral Murder video, for instance.
Moral of this story: Don't join the military for any reason whatsoever. And if you are drafted in, claim on your defense: "I would have been executed otherwise"
Basically this is the only answer. I think of this (but rarely say it) when I hear people talk about supporting our troops and honoring their service. I don't honor people who willingly decide to be put in situations that almost certainly will be immoral.
The immoral act starts when you volunteer to join the gang that commits it.
I just met a guy who lost his legs to an IED that he KNEW was on the route he was ordered to take because they needed to get from A to B in the quickest possible time. He volunteered to go himself (he was the Captain of the platoon) but his team refused to let him make the run himself.
That was the THIRD IED he was hit by.
I'm glad we have people who are willing to risk their lives for us, no questions asked. They willingly go into hellish situations where they could lose life and limb and with little expectation of reward. Frequently the opposite.
You benefit from this sacrifice. You PROFIT from it. Don't pretend you're morally superior. Police go out and beat up bad guys so you can be safe.
If you were more of a man, you'd admit your cowardice and stay quiet otherwise.
This is precisely my point. People like you are wrong. Sure, your friend may have done something brave, but he still put himself in a situation where he would likely be asked to do wrong. He supported a government that uses force to try to get its way. We don't need that. I don't need that. Even if I profit from it, I didn't ask for it, and I really do have the moral high ground here.
Don't act like the people joining the military do it for some high flying idea of honor and defense of the country. They join in droves because they get to have an adventure with the feeling of danger but extremely low chance of injury. If we were actually fighting a real enemy that really could do us harm, I /might/ call that bravery.
You have an antiquated view of what it is to be "more of a man". You seem to be stuck in the past where blindly killing the others is somehow a good thing without stopping to think about the reasons. How about, why was your friend walking around in a foreign country in the first place?
I like how you couldn't try making your point with a reasoned argument, you had to use ad hominem. Classy.
I think that was a good thing because it established the principle that joining an organization does not absolve you from higher duties towards your fellow citizens or humanity at large.
Taking the high ground on soldiers just following orders in the context of WWII is bizarre. American soldiers killed a startling number of german soldiers and citizens during the post-war occupation. I imagine those American soldiers were just following orders too. The only reason the German and Japanese soldiers were demonized for following orders instead of the American soldiers is the fact we won and they lost. Morals are decided by the victor.
"Civilians might not understand." Fuck you. It doesn't take a military mind to understand the difference between right and wrong and how little either has to do with institutional rules. This country once took a firm stand that military orders were no excuse for committing or condoning evil acts, when it suited our purposes at Nuremberg. We abandoned that stand the moment it became inconvenient, in Vietnam if not earlier, and have not picked it up again since.
you're arguing from an ethical viewpoint, which is fine, but it does not apply to this sentence. i know this is hard, but let me explain.
in the civil justice system there are laws. if you break them, you get punished. some of them have special rules around them. take murder. kill someone, go to jail. but if it was self defence, you might walk. easy, right?
in the military justice system, leaking classified docs is a punishable offence. there is no way around this. there is no self defence, etc alternate way. you break the rule, you get court martialed. morals, ethics do not come into play here.
as a soldier, your interpretation of your oath does not apply here. it would when refusing orders like "kill those civilians over there", but only maybe and not in the way you'd like. again, military justice is not following the same framwork of rules and ethics you're used to as a civilian.
the armed forces in itself are not a democracy. they are a special area of society that exist to provide the ability to kill other humans. in order to do so anything civilian quickly goes out the window. the rules exist to enforce the most optimal sytem to maintain a killing force, not the well being of the individual within the organization.
if you don't like that, you should campaign for complete disarmament and the complete disassemblement of the armed forces. there is no half-way, grey area. once you have an army, it exists to kill humans, with all the consequences. the hero whorship present in the US around any soldier seems to imply that the US society has forgotten this (and then is surprised once something like the sentencing of Manning happens).
Nuremberg does not apply at all here. German officers were tried by the Allied Forces, not their own Army. This was the victors cleaning up. The US has not joined the International Criminal Court for similar reasons, to prevent other nations prosecuting its officers and soldiers (for war crimes, etc.). If you want to do so, you'll need to invade the US and be the victor. Note that Saddam was tried and sentenced by an Iraqi court, not an international tribunal even though US soldiers caught him.
You seem to think that I (and everyone else defending Manning) expected the prosecutors and the judge to have mercy and let him go with a pat on the head. You've got it wrong. Asking the military to set Manning free is as pointless as asking a hot iron not to fall on a child's face when the cord is tugged. Any curious toddler can be expected to yank on a cable, and any decent adult should be expected to expose concealed atrocities. The thing is, we're asking why the the iron was left out unattended, and you're going "uh, stuff hurts when it falls on you, it's the law of gravity." You're missing the point. Manning's fate isn't the disease, it's the symptom.
You make it sound as if life is a video game or something. He broke an arbitrary rule so he must pay the price. This isn't a game, ethics are always at play and we as the public have a duty to make sure our military is acting ethically.
It's not like the us military has had some unchanging set of rules. Throughout the last 50 years public ethics policy has vastly changed how the military functions and will continue to do so.
The armed forces may not be a democracy but they exist by the grace of our democracy.
The rules against releasing classified information are in no way arbitrary and have been long-standing parts of military and foreign affairs since their inception. There has been no time when releasing an indiscriminate cache of State Department cables would have ever been considered a legal gray area. (Indeed, the confidentiality of diplomatic communication has been a norm that has existed for thousands of years: http://isanet.ccit.arizona.edu/noarchive/jonsson.htm). Manning very clearly broke the law and could not have failed to know that he was breaking the law.
if you care that deeply about morals and ethics, you need to be for the complete abandonment of the Armed Forces. which is a classic pacifist position, but it should be clear that there can't be a grey area. you either have an apparatus to kill other human beings (incl. collateral damage) or you don't. insisting on clean war is hypocrisy. insisting on a clean and nice army is hypocrisy - soldiers exist to project force through violence, aka killing human beings.
policy has changed in regards to gays and females in the military, yes. but where exactly has there been policy impact when it comes to the ones of the receiving end of the military force? the US bombs people all over the world, all the time, women, children, no problemo. not a US citizen, no rights at all.
hypocrisy.
"the grace of your democracy guides the US Armed Forces".
HORSESHIT.
Makes you wonder why Manning joined up in the first place, consider the highly public ethical and practical failures of the executive branch and the army in the context of Iraq.
"Fuck you"?! You do realize you're trying to bully and intimidate someone whose opinion you don't agree with i. (and just happens to be factually correct and fairly balanced in delivery) Kind of ironic I'd say.
The "fuck you" is in response to a transparent attempt to exclude others from the discussion by asserting that they lack the credentials to participate in it, even though such "credentials" are plainly not required.
Although uncivil, it was not entirely unwarranted.
"Civilians might not like it, or even understand" is not an attempt to exclude civilians from the conversation, it's just an observation that civilians are unlikely to understand the complexities of the justice system internal to the armed forces. I'm a civilian, but I understand that joining the military means you are legally subject to additional laws and codes which are enforced completely by and within the armed forces.
It must be possible to understand that what Manning did was both the right thing to do and a clear violation of the armed forces code he agreed to uphold. Unlike civilian law, the armed forces must place a premium on obedience. People volunteer for and agree to these rules, so the outrage isn't as warranted.
> I'm a civilian, but I understand that joining the military means you are legally subject to additional laws and codes which are enforced completely by and within the armed forces.
Nobody here, as far as I can understand, is actually questioning that the UCMJ had jurisdiction so while your understanding there is appreciated, it was never really in question...
The issue is a conflation of legality and morality. Conflating the two, then asserting that civilians may not understand and are unequipped to discuss the two separately, is toxic to discussion and society as a whole. It is an attempt to remove civilians from the discussion, a discussion that they absolutely must be apart of.
As much as some people may wish it, this ain't Starship Troopers.
The OP said this isn't rule of law, it's savage reprisals. The counter to that was that it is military law, with an aside that civilians don't usually appreciate the difference.
It's a little obnoxious to be accused of conflating things one has explicitly separated, but I suppose on this topic those that are outraged are mainly here to vent rather than discuss, and there's nothing wrong with that, so I think I'll bow out here.
Perhaps that is vague, but to me that is clearly a statement about a distinct lack of justice. He obviously isn't saying that the UMCJ doesn't exist or that Manning does not fall under it; that would just be silly.
In an immoral legal system, justice is fleeting. He is accusing them of, not 'not existing', nor being incorrect, but rather of rendering a verdict that deserves no respect.
That's how I read it anyway.
Edit: His (much later) comment here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6251625) indicates to me that he understands this situation just fine. "I'm not disputing that Manning broke the laws of the military.... ...I don't see how you can defend the laws and regulations of an organization...."
I agree with this. The proper function of a military court is to examine compliance with military law, not to pass judgement on ethics outside of that law.
The function of civil authority, say a moral President, something I hope to live to see, would be to pardon Manning, overruling the military justice sentence in the context of a greater good.
Clearly, this will not happen. Obama will simply wash his hands - not explicitly, though. The media will never even ask the question.
So basically, not only is this true: "Fuck you. It doesn't take a military mind to understand the difference between right and wrong and how little either has to do with institutional rules."
..but the more extreme "It TAKES a civilian mind to understand the difference between right and wrong" is also true? If the military is unable to consider morality itself, then we must rely on civilians to call them out. Accusing civilians of being incapable of doing that then puts the military above any sense of morality. Disturbing, to say the least.
Anybody can point to this outcome and say, "this is unjust/immoral," military or not. In order to say "this outcome is illegal/improper procedure" you have to have some domain knowledge.
> "Anybody can point to this outcome and say, "this is unjust/immoral,""
That is what he was doing (see for clarification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6251625(, and that is why a reply of "civilians may not understand" got a strongly negative response.
One guy posting angry on Hacker News does not constitute bullying or intimidation, and "fuck you" is a fair and balanced response to the suggestion that military personnel are inherently morally superior to civilians.
While I'm at it, we need to drop this tired tactic of insinuating that strong disagreement is censorship. I have never suggested that anyone shouldn't be allowed to disagree with me, so, no, it's not ironic in the slightest.
Are those procedures as "forgiving" as the civilian ones?
“The Whistleblower Protection Act does not apply to the intelligence community. They’re exempt from it. And most people in the intelligence community don’t realize that. So, you can’t even go to the Office of Special Counsel because they’re exempt from that, too, and the merit system protection board. So even if you use the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, the only thing that gives you is the right to go to Congress. It doesn’t–it doesn’t have any teeth there to protect you against retribution from the agency that you’re reporting abuse on.”
Whistleblower procedures only work if what you are exposing is wrong according to the organization's own internal rules (written and unwritten).
What these people have been exposing isn't wrong according to the internal rules of the NSA/military/State Department/etc., therefore, there's no possibility of achieving change through internal whistleblowing.
Suggestion: anyone should stop listening to what Manning says about 2 years ago as this kid was brainwashed to extreme [1]
After all, give me the toughest of the toughest, 3 years sleeping naked and being woken up every 2 hours to a loud music and put me behind closed door, and I will make him swear and admit he went back in time and killed Jesus Christ himself.
Sorry, but looking at the current sex abuse issues going on in the military, and the complete breakdown in the system set up to deal with them, I wouldn't rely on internal whistleblower procedures
They don't work, they have never worked, and there's plenty of people who tried to make them work who have been testifying that they don't work, as loudly as possible, for years. I'm sure someone somewhere had idealistic purposes in mind when they drafted them, but in practice the primary purpose of whistleblower procedures in the military is to let the brass know who the troublemakers are.
I firmly believe that Manning did a service to society.
However, there is something my grandfather, an Air Force crypto guy, used to say: "... Have a fair trial and then hang the guilty SOB." To me, this always came off as blind obedience and "kangaroo court" justice.
Yup. There is a popular myth amongst the sheeple that those in power share a citizen's best interests. One must always remember that this ostensible pretense is rarely ever the case.
There is a popular myth amongst the sheeple that those in power share a citizen's best interests.
I find it hard to believe than anyone except for a small minority actually believes that to be the case. If it were, vast partisanship wouldn't exist, since whoever was in power would be considered to "share their best interests".
You would do best to remove your obscene personal attack quickly. Do that and you would have expressed a valid opinion. Don't and you're likely to be banned.
So, once you put on that uniform you have to keep your mouth shut even if you witness the worst atrocities imaginable. Is that your opinion? If it is not, where do you draw the line?
When is it okay to break the loyalty for the greater good?
Agreed, but since he did expose some pretty nasty stuff, maybe we should cut him some slack and focus on the real villains?
It's now, according to the actions of these justice systems, worse to expose secrets about crimes than to commit actual crimes. The simplest way of interpreting this is that these crimes are not viewed as crimes at all. But blowing the whistle is.
if you don't like this, you'll need to change the US constitution. "The Congress shall have Power... To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval forces."
I agree that your first example should have been covered - at high levels - by the code of conduct. However, the other two are civilian authorities who acted illegally, not military personnel who violated the code of conduct. Wrong jurisdiction.
Those would be covered by international war crimes cases, something to which the United States of America will never submit. Alternatively, they could also be addressed by a moral President - unfortunately, Obama decided we should just all move on and ignore the war crimes committed in our name.
Yes I agree, when you join the army you are expected to give your life for your country protecting your peoples. As this goes, Army in most contries have different sets or rules set up for people within.
FWIW in most contries soldiers are fodder for other purposes beyond fighting wars, sometimes are subjects in scientific studies that border on eugenics crap that everyone knows of.
For what I would say - friends don't let friends join an Army.
I don't see any connection between investigating the symptoms of a disease and... oh wait are you saying that the 'eugenics' would be the army performing such experiments only on certain racial/whatever groups of army grunts, and not on the general population of army grunts?
I don't really buy it. I think the army would want test data for all races. Contaminated agent orange for people of all colors.
I was thinking on exactly these lines: " friends don't let friends join an Army." People don't realize how much negative impact this kind of ruling would have on future recruitments of the army?
I'm not going to take the bait and allow you to define that default behavior for Soldiers as that of a civilian killer.
The Soldiers know what they sign up for, and if you've never been scared for your life in a combat zone, I'd argue that you lack the perspective to that claim.
If a Soldier doesn't feel comfortable with their mission, they have many ways of dealing with it that do not involve being gagged by their superiors.
I hope you'll agree that the discussion on the parent thread was about newbies joining the army and not about Soldiers who are through with their training and know the many ways of 'dealing' with it.
I don't agree that there is a need to separate them. They are thoroughly indoctrinated going in, and during basic training. New Soldiers are given a battle buddy to watch over them, and a team leader to watch over them, and a squad leader, platoon leader, etc. Sorry, but it's just not there.
Yes they both broke the laws and/or contracts. However, they did it only to expose alleged misconduct or illegal activities of their employers. Therefore whistleblower protections should apply, and they cannot be convicted of those actions.
Whistleblowing always, by definition, includes breaking some law or contract to expose secret information (otherwise it would be public and already known). Since exposing alleged misconduct is a good for the society, someone should not face any penalty for doing so.
The problem with your argument is that it's not that he blew the whistle, it's that he didn't do it in a responsible manner.
Also, whistleblowing doesn't always include breaking a law or contract. Also, he also exposed things that WEREN'T wrongdoing, and even the "wrong" things he "exposed" were pretty much already known and "wrong" is VERY subjective in this circumstance. The "wrongdoing" was not in what happened in the video, nor the number of civilian casualties, those are accidents and mistakes, but in the misrepresentation of those events. That is not really in and of itself wrong.)
And really, the thing that got him most in trouble were the hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables that exposed no wrongdoing but still exposed state secrets.
The cables themselves didn't express any American wrongdoing though. It expressed American opinions regarding other nations' governments and internal politics.
And either way I wouldn't be so quick to claim that inciting those revolutions is on the balance a positive thing for either Manning or Wikileaks, for the same reason that toppling Saddam's despotic regime was not (on the balance) a good thing.
>However, they did it only to expose alleged misconduct or illegal activities of their employers.
There is a reason Snowden was very careful to point out in his first public interview that he'd been very selective about what he chose to release and that he wasn't just mass dumping information like Manning did.
b. Your obligations as a U.S. citizen and a member of the armed forces result from the traditional values that underlie the American experience as a nation. These values are best expressed in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, which you have sworn to uphold and defend. You would have these obligations—our country, your service and unit and your fellow Americans—even if the Code of Conduct had never been formulated as a high standard of general behavior.
Ah, yes. The law. If someone breaks the law, they are punished. Justice is that simple.
Oh, wait, unless the laws happen to constrain the interrogation techniques used against detainees. Or if they prevent access to the private lives of American citizens. Or if they protect whistleblowers. Or if they get in the way of fighting terrorism in any other way.
But aside from that minor footnote of an afterthought, the law is the law, so we all need to just shut up and accept it.
> Civilians might not like it or even understand, but Manning hopefully did when he chose to join the Armed Forces.
Maybe that makes sense if the only relevant is between the Armed Forces and Manning. But here's the thing: civilians are the ones paying for the military.
I don't think anyone expected Manning to be found innocent. But it will be quite telling whether he is eventually pardoned.
The most worrisome aspect to me is that the administration does not appear to be remotely open to pardoning either Manning or Snowden, while at the same time ignoring the abuses each revealed.
Before this happened, I would have expected the response to be more measured and would have expected there to be some kind of review/investigation of the crimes revealed by the leaks in tandem with attempts to punish the whistleblower... then later after the investigation a possible pardon.
That we are not seeing this happen makes me wonder if I am wrong about the degree to which we have the rule of law in the US.
Obama should do it now, but I will be fine if he waits, just as long as he does it. Until then Manning's incarceration will serve as a focal point to the dishonesty that pervades our government.
If the law is selectively applied, it's not the rule of law. I think you'll find a lot of people here will think that they threw the book at him, because he challenged the system.
And Snowden is actually in the same boat here. He's not military, but he had clearance, so he's liable for quite a bit. I'm not sure which court would trial him, so there might be some differences.
Manning is the single most prolific leaker of U.S. documents in history. By what standard do you think that a 35-year sentence, with possibility of parole, is "selectively applied"?
The article points out he is eligible for parole after a third of the sentence, and that he'll receive credit for time already served. They even do the math for us - he'll be eligible for release in 8 years.
Leonard Peltier is still in prison. It's extraordinarily unlikely that Manning will ever be paroled; the U.S. Government holds grudges, as Greenwald's spouse has so recently seen.
It's five years off the average lifespan in terms of it being half a lifetime. And you spend your first 16 odd years under with relatively little autonomy anyway.
In terms of usable adult life, he's had around a decade at most. And the last 15 years are kinda crappy anyway. If you look at things that way, then it's questionable whether this is any kinder than just putting him up against a wall and getting it over with.
I've found that people use the "stop putting words in my mouth" line when someone follows their words to a logical conclusion. This leads me to believe that the sentence really means "quit pointing out flaws in my reasoning."
I guess you could read the conversation before commenting. Here, I'll make it easy for you: I said "35 isn't even half a lifetime... he'll be about 60 when he gets out." and clarky07 said "missing out on 25-60 is totally reasonable. nothing important happens during those years anyways." which is not the same thing as what I said. See? clarky07 tried to make it sound like I said that 35 years was no big deal, but I didn't say that.
I bet your use of passive-aggressive condescension wins all your arguments for you, and wins you the respect of all your peers.
Now, if you said that 35 isn't half a lifetime, and that he'll be about 60 when he gets out, how doesn't that minimize the focus on the effect those 35 years of incarceration actually have on Manning? Were you just so insensitive an engineer that you felt the cold, literal correction was somehow benefiting the conversation?
Your other comment said I wasn't being logical enough. Now I'm being too logical? I didn't think it was very passive either. That leaves... respect of my peers. OK, I have a lot of time on my hands so I'm game:
I think that exaggeration of the effect of Manning's leaks is what led to the overly harsh sentence in the first place. The least we could do in discussing it is not make the same mistake.
I think Manning's sentence is much too long. But at the same time, I don't think misrepresenting how harsh it is does any side of the argument any good. I'm sensitive enough to realize that if we want reasonable sentences, we will have to be honest about how harsh a sentence really is. I can also predict that critics will write us off as irrational or whiny if we make a habit of overreacting every time something happens we don't like.
I'm not insensitive. On the contrary, I can imagine much worse sentences that could have been handed down, up to and including capital punishment for treason. As crushing as the final sentence must be to Manning and those near him, I can also understand the coping mechanisms they will resort to to deal with it. One of those is that the sentence is not as bad as it could have been.
>clarky07 tried to make it sound like I said that 35 years was no big deal, but I didn't say that.
>35 isn't even half a lifetime. He was born in 1987 (geez, he's younger than I am)
How is this not minimizing the severity again? At the very least it's more than half his remaining lifetime, and possibly all of his remaining lifetime. He also gets to miss out on pretty much any chance at having a family. His only friends will be other convicts. I hope he at least manages to get out on parole, but there is certainly a chance he doesn't.
Calling 35 years "a lifetime" is exaggerating. Calling 35 years less than half a lifetime is accurate, not minimizing. "Half his remaining lifetime" is probably true, and that's also a valid way to look at it. But it doesn't really contradict what I said, because what I said is true. ("Possibly all of his remaining lifetime" is incredibly cynical, but technically true.)
First off, it's not that cynical. Plenty of people die before the age of 60. Male life expectancy is 76, so 35 years is 70% of expected remaining.
Also, the point I was originally making, is that for most people the quality of life between 25-60 is far higher than the quality of life from 60-95. Even if he does happen to live to 95 and it's "only half", most people are going to enjoy age 35 more than they are going to enjoy age 95.
I think this is the main point that I repeat over and over, the UCMJ is that he swore to uphold and abide by and by THAT rule of law he was tried against.
Being in the military is different than NOT being in the military.
Every single thing you wrote is objectively correct, but in spite of that there are a couple of dozen responses calling you names and saying you are wrong. Fascinating.
Anyway, I'm personally glad that the military has finally prosecuted him and that he can get on with his life after serving his time.
You have not stated something that's mutually exclusive with the statement you are replying to. It's possible for military law to be used precisely as the person was claiming it was - to support the implementation of questionable policy through enforced ignorance of the people. Indeed one could argue that to a great extent that's what military law in this regard is for in the first place.
#
Personally, I think there's only room for one law in a country. The minute you start splitting off separate courts for special interests, in which civilian juries can't intervene, you make a mockery of the idea of civilian control - separate it too far from the issues for it to be meaningfully applied.
Would it matter? The rules do not all go away just because they have not been always evenly enforced. It's like saying you should be able to go on a sleepover because Foolene's parents let her go.
Manning was either guilty of not guilty of the things he was charged with, and that is independent of what some General says to Congress. If the system does not ensure equal justice then the system should be fixed, but that would not change anything relating to Manning's actions and the consequences of those actions.
You'd think with as many web devs as we have on HN that more people would understand stateless protocols and independent transactions.
It may be that one set of rules (the UCMJ) requires him to lie (about this particular topic), while another set of rules make lying to congress illegal.
"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" often put people into paradoxes where they were required by one set of rules to not disclose their sexuality while another set of circumstances + rules required them to disclose it (ie., not lie), or face penalties.
It's worse. Insubordination is a jail-able crime in the military, think about that; telling someone no, or simply showing disrespect whether on or off duty to the wrong person can land you in jail. The military life is a different world with vastly different crimes and rules than the civilian world. You can misbehave in public off base while off duty and still get demoted at work (pay cut) because of your behavior. Your law is the UCMJ, not the law civilians follow.
Manning swore to protect the US Constitution and did just that. I wish there were more citizens in the uniforms who take their oaths as seriously as he did. The same goes regarding Snowden. The whole of NSA takes an oath to protect the US constitution on the one hand. On the other NSA has programs that basically destroy the US Constitution. And the only guy who takes his Oath seriously and reveals NSA's anti-Constitution war is the guilty one?
Something wrong with the morals of the people in the uniforms nowadays. The Oath is to be taken seriously. If you take an Oath to protect the US Constitution and then are given orders that basically destroy it, you bear the responsibility not to fulfill them and reveal those secret actions to the US public.
Modern USG is neither proscribed nor prescribed by the written constitution - it is extraconstitutional (same as Google). However, as it has usurped the constitutional government and is forcefully extracting our wealth to fund its empire, it is a domestic enemy.
Manning swore to protect the US Constitution and did just that. I wish there were more citizens in the uniforms who take their oaths as seriously as he did. The same goes regarding Manning.
"The 250,000 diplomatic cables that Pfc. Bradley Manning disclosed through WikiLeaks endangered the lives of foreign citizens and made some international human-rights workers reluctant to seek U.S. help, a State Department official testified Friday."
"Kozak said some of the cables that Manning downloaded from a classified government computer network identified people as sources of information that would put them at risk of death, violence or incarceration if their involvement were publicly known"
"Kozak said the greatest damage to State Department human-rights efforts was a "chilling effect" on foreign activists seeking U.S. help."
"They can't be sure now whether what they say to us is going to remain confidential or whether it's going to be broadcast around," Kozak said."
He basically outed a bunch of foreign activists that were helping us and put them in danger. Not exactly what I would refer to as "fiddle-faddle"
The State Department itself has said that the cables were "not damaging."
"...State Department officials concluded late last year that the publication of leaked United States diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks 'was embarrassing but not damaging.'
Robert Gates, Defense Secretary at the time:
"Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest."
There is a difference between "consequences for foreign policy" and "consequences for the people actually on the ground".
Swift action on the part of the military and State Dept. after the leaks is what helped make it possible for there to be, in the end, little consequence to foreign policy and little to no fatalities for the people they knew about.
That does not mean, however, that there was no existential threat between the time the leaks were published and the time when that action was finally complete.
The fact that the State Dept. might have been able to salvage the situation doesn't mean there was never a problem in the first place.
How could you possibly know that? I'm all about war crimes being exposed but Manning did not do it the right way. 95% of the stuff he released was not needed and did put people in danger. A lot the people you and I have never heard of. I don't know for sure that no one died but you can't possibly know that no one has died. It seems very likely that if an informant or other foreign national in Iran(or other similar type country) was working with the US and was exposed that their fate isn't looking real healthy at the moment.
It is my personal opinion (and the intent of the FOIA and laws regarding classification) that everything should be released unless it is damaging, which almost nothing Manning released could have been. The fact that the US government hasn't been able to point to a single death resulting from Manning's leaks implies to me that everything he released should have been public to begin with.
You say that "95% of the stuff he released was not needed". I would argue that 95% of it needed to be released.
>>which almost nothing Manning released could have been
Again how do we know that? How do we as not involved in the Intelligence game at that level know? I'm not about letting anyone off on war crimes. They need brought up on charges and now. However little details can easily lead to lots of other bits of information. Manning didn't think about that, he just opened the firehose. There is no clear answers but endangering others for no real reason has to have consequences.
>>The fact that the US government hasn't been able to point to a single death resulting from Manning's leaks implies to me that everything he released should have been public to begin with.
Again how do you know that? Just because they haven't doesn't mean they can't. To point to deaths mean they but the others in the chain of intelligence at risk.
okay, but how would YOU possibly know otherwise?? Just because state official told you?? like those don't lie??
Just pay attention exactly to their words: they can say anything they want to, unless they "show me the money", give me a proof, they can keep blabbing regardless if they are state employee or president of the Milky Way himself!
I get your point but these are peoples lives, you have HAVE to side on caution. Getting people killed just because we believe, that the government MIGHT be lieing with no proof the other way, isn't good enough. That's more blood that we as American people don't need.
There is nothing vague about endangering others when disclosing large amount of data. If he had just wanted to disclose the war crimes then I'd be incredibly outraged at his prosecution but he was reckless and put others into danger because of it. A whistle blower also has the responsibility to only disclose the important data, he failed at that.
He did, he released info that could, COULD, have lead to other informants directly. You have no idea rather or not anyone actually came to harm, neither do I, but the possibility is plain because of his actions and irresponsibility. If I drive drunk I'm arrested because I MIGHT harm someone with my irresponsibility. No different here, he released info that could lead directly to other intelligence agents, that puts them directly into harms way.
Dude, he released documents containing information about villages that were cooperating with the U.S. and even information on informants by name.
Don't you remember when Assange was pissed off at a journalist at The Guardian for leaking the password to the cables in his book and thereby revealing the actual names? Assange tried to turn it into a blame game instead of admitting that they hadn't properly redacted the documents.
Your "foreign activists... helping us" deserves to be qualified. Helping "us" do what? Meddle in other state's domestic politics? Set up arms deals? Intellectual property treaties? Overthrow democratically elected governments?
The "State Department human-rights effort" is not exactly world-renown for its ethics. Quite the opposite.
I can provide one example from direct personal experience.
A citizen of a country with a repressive regime was revealed by release of the diplomatic cables to have provided information to the US State Department on the persecution of church members in their country. They have subsequently had to flee the country, being separated for years from their spouse and children who have remained trapped at home.
Obviously I am being deliberately minimal in my description - which I have to be given that I am indeed telling the truth.
Do you really find it more credible that I am lying than that the massive release of diplomatic cables has had at least one severely negative and unintended consequence?
To provide a bit more context - it is common for any Christian in some countries to be accused of being a US collaborator. Once your name appears in US diplomatic cable, regardless of the reason, it is very bad news.
"The U.S. State Department is set to announce $28 million in grants to help Internet activists, particularly in countries where the governments restrict e-mail and social networks such as those offered by Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and Google Inc. (GOOG)"
"The program, which has drawn Republican criticism and budget cuts, has produced software that is spreading widely in Iran and Syria, helping pro-democracy activists avoid detection, said Dan Baer, deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor."
Well, you can start with Iran. The reason it's such a mess today is because of our own meddling in 1953. Well, meddling isn't really the right word. More like a CIA-backed coup to overthrow Mossadegh and install a brutal dictator, all because BP didn't like Mossadegh's decision to push legislation nationalizing the oil fields. There's also Indonesia. We weren't exactly doing the communists any favors there either. We didn't mind that hundreds of thousands of people were being slaughtered then. We tacitly accepted it at best, because we didn't want another domino to fall in the wrong direction.
Right, because helping "Internet activists" to access Google, FB and Twitter totally had nothing to do with securing the NSA's power to spy on those countries.
> Your "foreign activists... helping us" deserves to be qualified. Helping "us" do what? Meddle in other state's domestic politics? Set up arms deals? Intellectual property treaties? Overthrow democratically elected governments?
Are any of those things necessarily problematic if the United States decides it is in its interest to engage in them? Be aware that what you think of when you say "meddling in domestic politics" may be interpreted differently by others.
When information leaks, and that results in supposed harm to people, why is it appropriate to blame the leaker of the information rather than the people who committed the actual acts described by the information?
He won't get parole in 1/3rd the time - that will be the end of the fourth Clinton administration and they will be sure to send someone to argue against his release, which since it's military, they will all blindly fall in line and obey.
Just imagine the crimes the government will be doing by then given what they are getting away with now. With what it will have to cover up they will need examples of people in prison forever to stop people from even thinking of talking about it.
And what penalty did his superiors receive? Nothing. Privates should never have access to secret information without supervision. If he did someone else should be responsible and take the penalty.
If you paid attention to the sentencing hearings, it was clear that the chain of command should be largely responsible for the happenings of the Manning case. They repeatedly ignored and swept under the rug issues related to his mental state and fitness for duty, and a lot of it was done for the reasons of DADT.
The US military has subtle mechanisms that would not be obvious externally. I'm sure it varies and changes, but something as simple as the timing of an officer's promotion, or review without promotion, can signal an "end of career" event. Someone familiar with the branch and with access to the promotion data could tell you if an officer in the chain may have been held responsible.
Clinton pardoned 150 people and commuted 39 people and their sentences during his four years. Most of these were done on his last day in office and caused some controversy. Of course his number of pardons paled in comparison to Carter and Reagan who both pardoned over 400 a piece.
The President who has arguably undertaken the most aggressive campaign against information leakers in the modern American politics is going to do something about this. I agree.
Seing how they treated him pre-trial, I was really thinking this will be Kangoro court with rubber stamp and maximum possible sentencing for all the "crimes" that Bradley did. Glad that the judge was semi-reasonable. Think on the positive side; 1/3 out of 35 years is about 10 years! (he already served 3).
They will never let him out in 10, imagine the crimes they will have to cover up by then and they will need examples to threaten the rest of the military with.
They will make a show of his parole trial and be sure to send him back in for the next 20.
Your boss is not your only reporting option, the US Army has a whistleblower option precisely for soldiers to report gross misconduct and crimes without being victimised by their immediate superiors.
It's probably unpopular here, but I think Manning leaked what he did not as a principled whistleblower, but as a confused/spurned/etc. kid. And deserves substantial punishment for betraying his oath as a member of the military and TS clearance holder for ultimately personal reasons (and doing it in a stupid way).
Snowden, on the other hand, was quite principled. One might argue he went about it the wrong way (should have gone directly to Congress or a federal judge, or leaked less info), but I think what he did is quite defensible.
So, I'd stand with Snowden, but I think Manning deserves to be in prison. I was expecting 20-50 years sentence, dishonorable discharge, etc. He got 35. I think 10-20 would have been fair, but the general sentencing based on other similar crimes pushes for higher. There should have been a greater reduction than 112 days for how he was treated in pre-trial detention, possibly a halving of his ultimate sentence.
I also predict PFC Manning will serve less than 5 years, and not because he's released early.
And Binney, Drake, Wiebe are even more unambiguously moral than Snowden (although I think Snowden is closer to them than he is to Manning). Those 3 deserve a Nobel.
> "When a soldier who shared information with the press and public is punished far more harshly than others who tortured prisoners and killed civilians, something is seriously wrong with our justice system."
I find this a strange point to make. Neither war crimes nor soldiers' misconduct falls within the boundaries of what we usually call "our justice system".
I'm sure there will be punishment, but that it'll be out of the courts. The last thing they want publicized is a case about American Marines mistreating a convict.
I think that, all things considered, this is the best possible outcome (realistically). There was no way he'd walk, because he did break laws. In this instance those laws were broken to get information out to the public, but one can easily imagine when those laws could be broken for more malicious purposes. If you leave this unpunished, they might think this opens up the floodgates. The powers that be would most likely prefer to deter 100 whistleblowers if it means stopping the one person who'd use the information for terrible ends.
> In this instance those laws were broken to get information out to the public, but one can easily imagine when those laws could be broken for more malicious purposes. If you leave this unpunished, they might think this opens up the floodgates.
I'm not going to comment about the length of the sentence itself. But sentencing is supposed to take into account the exact details of the offence. "one can easily imagine when those laws could be broken for more malicious purposes" is a reason why somebody breaking laws for more malicious purposes should get a longer sentence. So your argument actually works the other way: it explains why Manning might have been expected to get a lesser sentence.
That's silly. Motive is taken into account for everything else. If you kill someone by accident it's different than if you commit premeditated murder. The person planning to maliciously use classified secrets should expect a stiffer response than a whistleblower like manning.
Edit: Intent, not motive is what I meant to say. Thanks. Point remains though. You can argue that he did deserve something for the reasons rayiner mentions, but you can't argue that he deserves something to make a point to people with malicious intent. If you don't think he had malicious intent, he shouldn't get as much penalty. They should still expect to get the bigger penalty.
Motive isn't taken into account, intent is taken into account, which is a narrower concept. "Intent" goes to whether you did something by accident or on purpose (or something in-between). "Motive" goes to the "why."
So killing a person with your car may be no crime at all if you were driving carefully and he jumped out of nowhere, if you do run over someone on purpose than it doesn't matter why you did so. Maybe he's a doctor who performs abortions and you believe that you're saving babies from being murdered by killing him.[1] That doesn't make it any lesser degree of murder.
[1] I purposefully use that controversial example to make the point that not everyone agrees on the purity of Manning's conduct, just as not everyone agrees on whether abortion is murder or not. Many people believe that indiscriminately leaking hundreds of thousands of documents goes far beyond "whistle-blowing" into conduct intended to maliciously embarrass the United States in diplomatic relations.
He did break laws, but that doesn't necessarily mean he was wrong. This is why jury nullification exists, though I'm not sure if that even exists in a military court.
To support this stance, this comes from the posted article:
“There is value in deterrence, your honor; this court must send a message to any soldier contemplating stealing classified information,” said Capt. Joe Morrow, a military prosecutor. “National security crimes that undermine the entire system must be taken seriously.”
In fact, weren't his lawyers asking for a sentence of 30 years? Sounds like they got almost what they asked for.
"Years faced" is a misleading number, though. I think it's pretty rare that defendants get sentenced to the maximum for each charge. The government was "only" asking for 60.
Growing up as a conservative, hyper-patriotic American it pains me to say that I hate my country. A young man exposes wrongdoing by the military and gets sentenced to 35 years in prison while the administration that started an illegal war with Iraq, costing untold American and Iraqi lives, are free.
Don't hate your country. First he leaked a ton of classified military stuff, not just bad or morally questionable things and while his treatment was shameful, the judge did take that into account during sentencing.
Finally don't hate your country because it is actually great. In most nations we would never have heard of this because it would be the way things were done, second it was the US that thought the rest of the world the ideas behind freedom. Sure it fails from time to time, but that is just because it is compromised of humans, who are awesome but fallible creatures.
Actually Dane, but yeah I like the US. I don't often agree with their government in the things that end up in the media, but I like the country and I have a serious and profound respect for the genius of Jefferson.
"it was the US that thought the rest of the world the ideas behind freedom"
The US thought the rest of the world how an arrogant world police looks like. The ideas of freedom (aka democracy I assume) mostly originate from europe (greek republic, french revolution, reformation, enlightenment). The american revolution is certainly important, but not the only one. Also, remember that you got some serious help from France in that revolution.
(not from the US, in case that wasn't at all clear).
I have some respect for the ideas of the French revolution, but it ended in a serious dictatorship, a reign of terror and a lot of death people instead of freedom.
This is why I try so hard to separate the US government and the American people.
However.... I cant pretend that the US people didn't vote for Obama, and Bush and Clinton before him. In a democracy the people have to take responsibility for the governments they themselves vote for. And no, ignorance is still not a defense.
This equally applies to my country, the UK. In the end, my real disgust is with my fellow Brits who also voted for all this, and seem not to care. Again, not just this current regime, but the Blair one before it.
We all vote for the same people, the same system over and over again. So, why on earth should or would government ever change? "We" condone it.
I struggle with the way in which no high level officials have even acknowledged that the leaks (by Manning and by Snowden) might have revealed some excesses or abuses that ought to be corrected.
How could any leader feel no obligation to address the core issues, or even to acknowledge they exist?
It's unlikely Snowden or Manning will be pardoned, and unlikely we'll see anything other than the most superficial reforms.
I think the bottom line is that in a state that relies heavily on propaganda, the truth is very dangerous, and we'll see an increasing amount of information become classified and stricter and stricter punishments for leakers.
IMHO the most noteworthy aspect of the info Manning leaked was that much of the classified info was simply "bad news" that contradicted the government's contrived story about what was going on in the wars.
There has been a long history of people standing against their government at the risk of their lives, because some few principles of morality are higher than governments.
We have seen the case of Thoreau and friends, against slavery. And then De Gaulle and friends, against Hitler. In old China, it was also very common for confucean public servant to criticise their emperor and wait for the supplice. Now we have Bradley Manning, we can pin his photography on the board of the braves.
And do not get to me on "what is morality?" or "how do you choose your principles?" These are obvious to those who know them, and useless (or dangerous, even) to the rest.
That's true for up to some level, but above that you arrive to some ether where rationality is useless or even dangerous.
You see a little girl running toward a minefield, you jump and save her, there is no reasoning. For many who believe in God (not my case) it is something you know is right, but has no reasoning behind.
But here it's just some moral principles that are above the law, above the country, and sometime even above oneself. That's what Snowden and Manning teach us (or me, at least)
> You see a little girl running toward a minefield, you jump and save her, there is no reasoning.
You see a little girl standing on top of a tall building, a crowd gathered below. You grow frustrated, tension rises. You start chanting "Jump! Jump!" and watch the girl throw herself to her death. There's no reasoning. [1]
I don't think anecdotes like that prove much. Human nature has us do things without thinking, for better and sometimes for worse. I don't think these moments of impulse necessarily embody any higher principle, or stand "above" rationality.
Having moral principles that stand "above" the law is fine: those will let you decide in favour of what's moral instead of what's legal. But that's still reasoning.
[1] This is surprisingly common when people jump from buildings.
It baffles me, if you look at the bigger picture, had Bradley Manning chosen to abuse human rights, murder a few civilians himself instead, he would have been living a free life now and probably would have been awarded medals too.
The law and constitution we hold to such a high standard and protect and hope it protects us, is not working anymore.
Nevertheless he still has full respect in my eyes, whatever the gov/justice can say or do, I thank him for exposing the truth. I have no doubt, a time will come when his actions will be seen as positive by most of the people.
>While working at the Marienfelde Field Site in Berlin, Carney began copying classified documents which he then provided to the East German Ministry for State Security (MfS) by repeatedly crossing back and forth into East Germany. In 1984 he was involuntarily transferred to Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas to work as a technical instructor. Unfortunately, Carney believed, Goodfellow AFB was a training base with no real-world intelligence of any interest to the MfS. He soon discovered that he had been very wrong. He continued providing the MfS with documents, meeting his handlers in Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro In 1985.
“National security crimes that undermine the entire system must be taken seriously.”
So when will Clapper, et al, be charged with perjury?
I consider lying before Congress to be an attempt to "undermine the entire system," and the truth is something which I take "seriously."
Selective application of the law is another symptom of the systemic illness which permeates our government, and this, coupled with the stream of deception flowing from the highest levels of the administration, is rapidly eroding that fabled "moral high ground" which is constantly invoked in justification for abrogations of the public trust.
The damage done to the reputation of the USA by the actions of those in high places is much more serious than the release of innocuous documents by Manning.
I very much doubt that he will serve the full 35 years, two aspects being that today it is political and down the line mentalities (govermental and people) change, slowly and generaly for the better.
Think of somebody who was in the German army during WWII and tried to kill Hitler and failed. In Germany he violeted the law and would be tried and found guilty and punished with more years than Manning. Manning did not kill or try to kill people and his motivations show no intent of that happening and the opposite in that he was trying to prevent unlawful killing by his actions however right or wrong they were. In the Allies eye's though somebody trying to kill Hitler during the war would be a hero and prasied and on balance not so many years later even the german army as a whole would agree that it was the right thing to do at the time, even if not judged as such.
So whats the issue, well it is about milatary or goverments keeping secrets that show them going aginst what is moraly right in the peoples eye's in part. This is why such secrets are classified for a time and then released, albiet some redactions refering to other documents that are more sensitive and have a longer release delay imposed upon them. But most makes the surface in your lifetime, Manning in his part experdited some aspects and the one that we all know and remember would be the helicopter shooting the wrong people, sadly we do not know if those people had been under on the build up to that event, that was not released from what I know. They may of been on tripple shifts or just lost a friend in a similiar situation, everybody is different and humans do make mistakes, some wrong, some very wrong and should not be made. But that is another matter
The point I'm trying to highlight is that in say 5 years, 10..15..... would the mentalities of those future times stand by this judgement. Yes it is right to send a message, but over time that message reaches home and people get cases reviewed or paroled, but I just feel he will not serve that full 35 year term, but that wont change tomorrow or soon.
If anything the longer this matter and topic is in the news then the longer the time will be that he is released early, that's how I see it.
For some reason, I think that Manning will be free much sooner, or the US will be in deep trouble. Not so much because of him, but I think that there are only two possibilities, either the US cut the security industrial complex serverly, or the deep state will take over. In the latter case, the US will loose its 'soft power,' and would face an empire breaking apart. On the other hand, if a administration would return to a reasonable security policies, then one of the first things they would do is to pardon Bradley Manning.
Its not clear to me what basis there is for any imprisonment in any prison inside of US soil, when there is no war in US soil and all the so called foreign wars are made up bullshit.
If his offense stems from a breach of contract, then kidnapping and forced imprisonment and slavery can not be a punishment for that breach of contract except as enforced by civilian courts. He should be able to tell the mercenary group to get lost and sue him in US civilian court.
How many years do soldiers get for killing civilians in the civilian courts?
The use of military tribunals in cases of civilians was often controversial, as tribunals represented a form of justice alien to the common law, which governs criminal justice in the United States, and provides for trial by jury, the presumption of innocence, forbids secret evidence, and provides for public proceedings. Critics of the Civil War military tribunals charged that they had become a political weapon, for which the accused had no legal recourse to the regularly constituted courts, and no recourse whatsoever except through an appeal to the President. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed, and unanimously ruled that military tribunals used to try civilians in any jurisdiction where the civil courts were functioning were unconstitutional, with its decision in Ex Parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 (1866).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_tribunals_in_the_Unit...
1) This is not the final word on Bradley Manning's fate. His supporters, who have already raised over $300,000 in his defense thus far, will not stop here.
2) 35 years is bad, but not as bad as it could have been. At least his defense successfully got rid of the "aiding the enemy" charge.
3) This will be appealed something like this, IIRC:
(a) Appeal to the convening authority (a military officer who has the power to reduce the sentence or overturn the conviction all together). This is the method that has allowed (more than one) convicted rapist go free: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/13/senators-critical-military-convening-authority - so if this were used to free Bradley Manning or reduce his sentence, it could help the Military defend the process in the court of public opinion! (However, this is EXTREMELY UNLIKELY!!!)
(b) Appeal to the Army Court of Criminal Appeals (ACCA)
(c) Appeal to Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces
(d) Appeal to the US Supreme Court
There is an article here that explains all the possibilities:
does anyone know if military prison is like civilian prison, in which you could be released early for a variety of factors including overcrowding, good behavior, appeals, parole, just plain ambiguity of sentencing, etc?
from what i read in the media it seems as though civilian sentences for non-capital crimes are basically flexible.... but i'm no expert.
What kind of world is this, where a soldier in a war zone indiscriminately dumps data into the hands of foreign actors and receives a full public trial and a jail sentence, while a teenage girl gets shot in the head for going to school?
I feel bad for Manning, but he at least opted to join an organization with a conspicuously poor human rights record at a time when it was many years into a bloody moral and legal quagmire.
I should've been more explicit: it's not the one-third per-se that's brutal, it's just that when I read "35 years in prison" it seemed like a hell of a long time to me. I don't know how the american judiciary system works, so I was was wondering if he would be able to reduce his sentence significantly for good conduct or something. But a third of 35 years is still very long...
He's going to spend at least 12 years in prison. I don't know if whether he deserves it or not, but it is brutal.
I'm under the impression he's transgender, not a transsexual. I'm not sure how being transgender makes one more, or less of a threat to society. People are people regardless of sexual orientation, physical gender, or the gender they identify with.
That being said, I don't think Manning is (or has been) a threat to society at all. Perhaps he should have been a little more careful about what he released but I feel he's done the world community a net good by exposing war crimes, etc[0].
I do agree he is being made an example of, and this sentence and his treatment is intended to be a signal and a warning sign to would-be leakers. I hope they still come forward and behave more like Snowden than Manning.
I was unaware of the distinction. Thank you for pointing it out.
As for why I brought up his transgenderism, it was one of those unexamined beliefs based on hearsay that seemed natural to believe, and wasn't obvious how absurd it was until it was pointed out. Specifically, the idea that transgender people are less likely to engage in crime like murder or theft, and hence would be less dangerous to society after spending time in prison. But that logic doesn't really follow, and the assumption was probably false anyway. Apologies. I meant no disrespect.
Transgenderism and transsexuality aren't disabilities. The gender a person identifies with doesn't in any way make them less dangerous.
Regardless, Manning was never a threat to society because his "crimes" never hurt anybody. He revealed corruption and I don't think his gender or sexuality played any role in that.
This young man had the courage to expose the war crimes committed by America, and now will essentially spend the rest of his life rotting in prison. More than anything this is an indictment of America as a nation, and the American people who could tolerate this and allow it to happen, under a President who won the Nobel "peace" prize.
As Orwell wrote: "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it".
I don't think that Manning deserves to go to jail.This sentence must be for the ones that allowed one ordinary soldier to access thausands ot highly classified documents.
No surprise. My opinion on the US gov is even lower than it was on Bushs period with his whole patriot act and Afghanistan/Iraq war crap. I expect nothing positive.
I feel what he did was morally correct, even though it was against the law. My only wish is that he would have been able to do this anonymously and not get caught.
So the guys who murdered innocents in another country using machine guns sitting on top of a helicopter are yet to be tried. While the guys who stood up for humanity and true spirit of serving forces for good is sentenced 35 years. And I know a lot of people would troll me on this opinion itself.
I totally understand that sentiment, but at the same time, the whole concept of classified information breaks down pretty quickly if you start saying it's okay for people to exercise their own judgement and break the rules.
There are always paths to responsible disclosure. From what I understand, many of them are pretty badly broken, and we certainly need to fix that.
But ultimately, you really don't want to set a precedent of "well, if you leak something and you really believe in your heart that it was morally justified, then we won't send you to jail."
Anyway, I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion here, so I shall now let the sea of downvotes wash over me.
What he leaked was available to 1.5+ million people in the USA. It is not by any reasonable meaning of the word classified, it is the proceedings of a seperate class of society.
Your assertion ignores the "need to know" aspect of classified information. Just having a clearance does not give you permission to access arbitrary secret data any more than having a driver's license lets you drive backwards down a highway.
That's nice, but obviously there was no oversight, no logging, not even simple rate monitoring. That is, after all, why Manning was able to wget this massive cache of data, and they would be none the wiser had he not revealed his involvement to people or systems he falsely deemed trustworthy.
> That's nice, but obviously there was no oversight, no logging, not even simple rate monitoring.
All of the above exists. In fact, it's required to exist, along with various access controls in the system depending on the protection level. All is specified in DCID 6/3.[1] That is not to say the requirements were implemented properly, or that the oversight was fully competent. It does, however, exist.
I suppose we could indent our conversation until people complain about us ruining the formatting and not agree here. (I spent too long on this, got an expired link, that's my signal to set noprocrast. Meanwhile vonmoltke has covered it in 1/10 the text volume. Someday I will learn to be concise.)
no oversight – how about "insufficient oversight"
no logging – I doubt this is true
…rate monitoring – This gets into a huge, hairy, and probably unsolvable problem called "aggregation". Briefly, I might be allowed access to specific bits of classified information in order to do my job, and each one of these is within my clearance. But, if I were to collect together enough of these facts the collection as a whole would provide more information than the sum of its parts and would need to carry a higher classification marking. Consider, people working at an airport need to know when a cargo plane is going to take off or land, say to plow the snow off the runway. But if I take all the take off and landing data, now I know the material flow, and if I take it over time, I can see what the military is strategically planning. This is the kind of problem that is so complicated that after coming up and derailing a few design meetings the officers in charge will realize that the "pie in the sky" ideas from the contractor will probably cost more than the whole rest of the development and never provide a usable solution, so it gets shelved for later releases and some sort of fig leaf is put in place to cover the mandatory requirement.
… able to wget this massive cache of data – I haven't looked at this specifically, but speaking from similar systems… There may be entities that access the data at high speed, especially reporting and analysis systems. (screen scraping is frighteningly common as a way to interconnect systems in the military) He may not have been an obvious outlier. Or maybe no one was watching. Or maybe he used wget's rate limiting options.
…they would be none the wiser had he not… – This is where the auditing comes in. After fact A,Q, and U are released, someone would probably start processing logs and see who retrieved A, Q, and U. Manning's indiscriminate collection would make him likely the only person that retrieved the union, or at least the only human on a list with a bunch of automated systems. It is after the fact, and too late to prevent damage, but it is possible the auditing would have brought him to the attention of investigators.
> but at the same time, the whole concept of classified information breaks down pretty quickly if you start saying it's okay for people to exercise their own judgement and break the rules.
Lawyers, priests, doctors, and psychologies who is all under strict confidentiality sometimes has to break that rule of secrecy when particular crimes is heard or observed. It doesn't matter how classified the conversation is, or the medical records. If they show child abuse, they must break the confidentiality and call the police.
The system has not broken down yet, even if those people has to make their own judgement calls when to break confidentiality. It is enough that they just suspect that a child might be in danger.
Shouldn't army personal who not only suspect, but can prove illegal activities be under the same scrutiny?
If Manning had just released documents related to specific illegal activities this would be a different conversation. That's not what he did though, in your doctor analogy what he did would be releasing the medical files of all 200 of his patients because he saw evidence of child abuse in one of them.
I agree. however, sometimes that can be a hard judgement call to decide. Say if a nurse find proof that a doctor is sexually assaulting children.
Would it be wrong if the nurse gave all that doctors patient files the press (given that the officials refuses to act)? If not, then what should the expected behavior be?
When it came to trial, how should sentencing be done? 35 years? What would be appropriate sentencing for the nurse if the number of patient files was in the thousands, but only a hundred or so had proof of criminal activity?
If Manning were aware of particular abuses, why didn't he release documents only about those particular abuses? If he wasn't, why did he release anything? This sounds like a case of "I know the evidence is in there somewhere, so let's throw it all out there and see what sticks." When prosecutors do this, we call it a "fishing expedition", and we don't like it at all. Why should we like it _more_ when a vigilante does it?
If I am pissed at my employer and decide to steal and publish all the internal documents I can, and I get lucky and some of them are incriminating, that doesn't excuse what I did. It just means that both I and my employer are criminals, instead of only me.
Yes, I most definitely agree that anyone out joyriding and shooting up civilians is a criminal, and it's outrageous that we haven't seen any action against them. I just don't think that that makes Manning any less of a criminal, which it seems some people are trying to assert. If you are not one of them then I apologize for interpreting your comments that way, but it does seem the most natural interpretation of a very short emotional appeal in response to an argument supporting Manning's sentence.
Aiui, they are. But, like a lawyer, doctor, or psychologist (a priest is not allowed break the seal of the confessional under any circumstances), there's a way of reporting these crimes. And shockingly, like a lawyer, doctor, or psychologist, it's not by sending all secret data they have access to to the press.
But ultimately, you really don't want to set a precedent of "well, if you leak something and you really believe in your heart that it was morally justified, then we won't send you to jail."
The precedent would be, "Go ahead and break the law, if you think your cause is worth serving the time. Then when it is all over and done, we will judge if your cause was worth breaking the law. If your cause was worthy, then we won't send you to jail."
It isn't about what he felt deep down inside, it is about what the result of his actions were. I'd hold guys like Dick Cheney to the same standard - he broke the law because he genuinely believed that terrorists were an existential threat to the US. But what he believed is irrelevant, the question is were terrorists really an existential threat? If not, he needs to do the time. But if he was correct, then walk free with our thanks for making the right call.
I'm kind of divided on this. On the one hand, it's obviously horrible to think that someone who leaked only information about something as serious as war crimes, and only after exhausting all legal avenues, would go to jail.
On the other hand, if we adopt a policy of exonerating people whose causes were found to be just, the number of people leaking things that really shouldn't have been leaked is pretty likely to increase. And we're talking about information that would possibly put lives at risk in the wrong hands.
I really don't know what the right answer is. But I know it's not cut and dry.
I think you have to provide exceptions for exceptional circumstances. Uncovering serious war crimes from by a nation that purports to holds itself and others to a higher standard should qualify as exceptional and be treated as such.
If those in power don't want to justify leaks and whistleblowers they should think harder about justifying and covering up murder and other crimes.
Anyway, I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion here, so I shall now let the sea of downvotes wash over me.
I actually think this is the popular opinion. Most people don't believe the government shouldn't be able to keep certain things secret or that any agent with classified knowledge has carte blanche to share whatever they deem fit.
It's a fair enough opinion, the problem is that there's no public input on whether leaking is justified - those in charge will say it isn't and that's that.
> the whole concept of classified information breaks down pretty quickly if you start saying it's okay for people to exercise their own judgement and break the rules.
Then let it break down! Information wants to be free and all that. I would MUCH, MUCH rather live in a world where government secrets are virtually impossible to keep than the world we currently live in. Government secrecy is a poison, anything that weakens it is good news as far as I'm concerned.
Well, that's kind of the point that the Mannings and Snowdens are trying to make, that the "paths to responsible disclosure" are at best ignored, at worst mined for reprisals as well.
Didn't Manning just dump a vast amount of data pretty much indiscriminately? That's very different from what Snowden revealed, which feels much more like actual 'whistleblowing' to me.
It does not seem unreasonable to me that diplomats need to communicate openly and frankly between one another, even as they say other things in public. In other words, just like we should be free of NSA spying, they ought to be reasonably sure their discussions don't get splashed over the internet unless it's to uncover some heinous or criminal activity. That would actually be whistleblowing. Maybe some of his data dump could be classified that way, but most likely most if it isn't. I admit to not knowing the details.
1) The company had been under fire all morning and the Apaches were called in by a soldier on the ground under attack at the location where the journalists were;
2) Among the group of men the two Reuters journalists were with, there were armed men an AK-47 and two RPG launchers, one loaded (and if you can tell that what the journalists are carrying are cameras and not weapons from the grainy video, in real time, you've got sharper eyes than me);
3) A portion of the tape is missing in which the helicopters engage armed insurgents that are seen running into a building; this portion precedes a section visible on the tape that shows the Apaches firing at the building with a missile.
So no, the soldiers in the helicopter should not be tried. If soldiers are in a theater of war, are called in because other soldiers are under attack, and see people with weapons, they should shoot, and that's what happened here. This was not one of those cases like you saw in Vietnam when soldiers just started shooting up civilians with no threat in sight.
> no, the soldiers in the helicopter should not be tried
Oh, I'm sure they won't be. No doubt whatever actions they took are entirely justifiable under whatever legal framework has been whipped up to cover it. Not like there's going to be Nuremberg trials for Iraq.
But at the end of the day, the video shows american soldiers in billion-dollar helicopters calmly killing innocent people in a foreign country they have no real reason to be in. That upsets people. And you can quote as many legal justifications as you want but none of that changes the profound injustice, and rock bottom morality, of what happened that day.
TL;DR: if the outcome of your legal process is profound injustice and innocent people killed without reason or consequence, your legal process sucks.
None of these are legal justifications. The law isn't even relevant here, since the conduct happened in a theater of war. The video shows soldiers in helicopters shooting at a group of people, some of whom are armed with AK47s and RPGs, in the midst of a firefight in which their comrade's are getting shot at nearby. In the process they mistakenly hit two reporters who are carrying equipment that reasonably could be mistaken for weapons from hundreds of meters away. You don't need legal justifications for that. Ordinary morality suffices.
> None of these are legal justifications. The law isn't even relevant here, since the conduct happened in a theater of war
You keep on repeating "theater of war! theater of war!" like it's some get out of jail free card giving you carte blanche to do whatever you want, for whatever reasons, without consequence. And I suppose, if you're America, it is.
But this is not some WWI battlefield. It's a city filled with millions of ordinary people living ordinary lives, with every right to live those lives in peace. "Theater of war" or not, if you're going to go and shoot up foreign cities filled with innocent people then maybe the burden of proof should be on you a bit that you kill the "right" people.
Everything you say is founded on a presumption in favour of the military. Their comrades were shot at before! Erring on the side of caution (caution for us, of course)! Hey, that could have been a gun! We didn't know there were kids!
Love to hear what all the bloodthirsty war fans would think if those were innocent americans being calmly cut to pieces by some unfeeling foreign gunner. "What's that you say? It's a theater of war? Oh well that's perfectly all right then! Fire away!"
The Army found two RPG launchers, an AK47 and an RPG round under one of the bodies among the first group. Assange later acknowledged as much. "Based upon visual evidence I suspect there probably were AKs and an RPG, but I'm not sure that means anything..."
AKs were commonly carried for security reasons at the time, but the RPG was damning as insurgents. (I had a 9mm and an AK most of the time, and a bunch of suspiciously mortar tube like satellite dish stands in the back yard, which always scared me whenever helicopters flew over...)
Yes, especially when they saw the rescuers come and try to save the injured, they just had to kill those as well. How dare rescuers try to save lives! This is war, which clearly means shooting anything that moves is the best policy. </sarcasm>
It's not just "war" in the abstract. The context of the video is that there is literally a firefight going on nearby in which U.S. soldiers are under attack. The helicopters shot at what appeared to be a group of armed men ("appeared" because some of the men actually were armed) and then shot at a van that appeared to be trying to pick up "bodies and weapons" (according to the soldier who radioed in for permission to engage the van). In the context of a firefight, that means the van is a potential threat--those wounded and the weapons could go back to fighting U.S soldiers.
This is not a "shoot anything that moves situation." It's a "if you're called in to the middle of a firefight you resolve doubts in favor of whatever protects other U.S. soldiers."
"""
Gabriel Schoenfeld, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute said of the airstrike:.
It is precisely the presence of weapons, including RPGs, that goes a long distance toward explaining why cameramen for Reuters—pointing television cameras around corners in a battle zone—were readily mistaken by our gunships for insurgents. The video makes plain that in this incident, as in almost all military encounters in both Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers are up against forces that do not wear uniforms—a violation of international law precisely because it places innocent civilians in jeopardy.
"""
Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's never appropriate to second-guess a soldier's conduct in war. But "war crimes" are purposefully malicious actions in the absence of a threat. Not bad judgment calls in response to what you can make out from hundreds of meters away in the middle of a firefight.
You need to check your facts and your baises. There were never any weapons being picked up by the van nor did they ever "appear" to do so. The talk of weapons where wishful thinking because they were so set on engaging:
06:33 Come on, buddy.
06:38 All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.
06:44 Crazyhorse this is Bushmaster Five, Bushmaster Four break. We are right below you right time now can you walk us onto that location over.
06:54 This is Two-Six roger. I'll pop flares [drop flares]. We also have one individual moving. We're looking for weapons. If we see a weapon, we're gonna engage.
07:07 Yeah Bushmaster, we have a van that's approaching and picking up the bodies.
07:14 Where's that van at?
07:15 Right down there by the bodies.
07:16 Okay, yeah.
07:18 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like *possibly* uh picking up bodies and weapons.
07:25 Let me engage.
07:28 Can I shoot?
07:31 Roger. Break. Uh Crazyhorse One-Eight request permission to uh engage.
07:36 Picking up the wounded?
07:38 Yeah, we're trying to get permission to engage.
07:41 Come on, let us shoot!
07:44 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
07:49 They're taking him.
07:51 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
07:56 This is Bushmaster Seven, go ahead.
07:59 Roger. We have a black SUV-uh Bongo truck [van] picking up the bodies. Request permission to engage.
08:02 Fuck.
08:06 This is Bushmaster Seven, roger. This is Bushmaster Seven, roger. Engage.
The official report also comes to the conclusion that they were engaging the van because it was picking up wounded insurgents. Of course the wounded man wasn't an insurgent but one of the journalists.
You need to not judge the actions in the video based on soldiers talking like soldiers do. He clearly says on 07:18 that he thinks that the van is picking up weapons. An army report found, and Assange conceded that in the first group: "Based upon visual evidence I suspect there probably were AKs and an RPG."
Sure, the guy is eager to engage, but remember the whole context of this is that the Apaches were called in to protect American soldiers under fire in that area.
That decision was made when the rules of engagement were drawn up, by higher-ranking people and long before this incident. In fact I believe at the time, they were supposed to shoot anyone who picked up the weapon of an injured combatant, even if they weren't threatening anyone with it. Not sure what the logic was on that one, but it wasn't like the gunner was just making up rules as he went along.
I've seen you apologize for the NSA spying on everyone, for Google giving all of our data to the NSA while putting on their best "don't be evil" face and now you apologize for scum shooting innocent people from helicopters (AND ENJOYING IT!).
You're a terrible person, how do you live with yourself?
Well, reading this comment, I find you to be more scum than the helicopter pilot. He was eager to engage to protect the soldiers on the ground and thought he found the ones who were trying to kill them. Probably too eager, because war is hell, and despite all the best efforts of people to minimize civilian casualties, they can't. This is the actual reason I am an anti-war veteran.
You are just a coward behind a keyboard hurling insults from throwaway accounts, imagining yourself to be the better person.
Huh? BS. I come here to HN to grok the truth, to see other side, not to nod head in agreement. I learn so much from rayiner's view point. I don't agree with him on all points, but I'm definitely a better informed person because of his reasoning.
So the guys who murdered innocents in another country using machine guns sitting on top of a helicopter are yet to be tried.
You're dead on with that comment. The most galling aspect of this entire story isn't that Manning is going to serve some jail time (although that is absurd in its own right), but rather that all of the real criminals are walking away scott free, with no repurcusions for their behavior at all.
This will probably prove to be the case with the NSA situation as well. The people who ordered, and conducted, mass surveillance of people they had not business spying on, will never be punished. And no one will be held accountable even so far as losing their job, or being docked some pay. Keith Alexander and James Clapper and their cronies keep getting paid and probably get nice, cushy government provided pensions and the whole bit. Meanwhile, Edward Snowden is forced to hide out in another country, completely removed from his friends and family, and - for all we know - may ultimately wind up in jail right alongside Bradley Manning.
Tell me something isn't badly wrong with this picture?
Eh I think it's a stretch to call the pilot and gunner in the Apache video war criminals. There were US personnel nearby, they thought they made a positive ID on guys with weapons and potentially and RPG in that group and they made a judgment call. They opened fire thinking these guys were insurgents and when others came to help, they assumed the same.
Not saying that what they did was right, but I don't think it's a cut and dried case where you can say those guys should be in jail.
I don't think Manning was wrong for trying to get that particular story out there, but the indiscriminate nature of his leak is what destroyed his whistleblower defense.
If someone worked at Lockheed Martin, and had evidence of bribery of defense officials, but then also leaked 100's of thousands of documents that contain the classified schematics of every single weapons system them make, that guy would rightfully be put in jail. Maybe I'm wrong, but if you're whistleblowing on classified or confidential information, then you should limit your disclosure to what is relevant to the actual wrongdoing.
I think, for Manning, it has to be considered a victory, considering he was facing up to 90 years, and the gov't asked for 60. He could be out on Parole as "soon" as 2025.
I think it's earlier than that. The article mentions the time he's already served and a deduction for poor treatment in custody. That comes to nearly 4 years, itself.
I'm not sure if has to serve a minimum of (35-4)/3 or (35/3) -4, but I suspect it's the later if common sense is applied (which is often not the case).
The question is: Why should he be in prison at all? and why the other three murderers in the army who were exposed in the 'collateral damage' video be left free outside untried?
The question is why would someone end up leaking state secrets at all?: Hint: Those secrets are about wrong doings!
So did you actually watch the video of the "three murderers" and think critically about it, or were you swayed by the heavily editorialized subtitles and its sensational title?
I'm not convinced I see a crime committed. From what I saw and heard, I don't believe three crew members woke up that morning and decided "let's kill some civilians today".
Remember "mens rea"? We HNers all seem to think that's an important concept, except apparently when it's people we don't like (US military).
I do understand what you mean. Being an HNer may sound like becoming one of the echo-chamber but you might want to look at these statistics [1] and then decide for yourself:
Sure, but I really only have a few quick minutes so this might be a little scattered. There are some interesting things in some of the cables he leaked (it's going to be great for historians). There were even a few troubling things in there that probably deserve investigation.... but the vast majority of the cables were, at most, embarrassing. They strained foreign relationships and embarrassed allies & various diplomats by name. I don't know if anyone was hurt or killed over them, but I think it's at least plausible. For what? Were there any documents that Manning had access to that he didn't try to take? The indiscriminate nature of what he took makes me seriously question his motives. What specifically was he blowing the whistle on? I admit that whistleblower protection sucks in the military, but he didn't even try to go through the proper channels.
I agree the US overclassifies documents and is too secretive. I agree we need more transparency and I certainly agree we need better whistleblower protection and oversight...But I don't think that gives everyone with access the right to unilaterally declassify whatever they want without penalty. The military can't work like that. No organization can work like that.
What Manning did was stupid. And while I agree that 35 years is harsh (mostly because I don't believe in prison terms above 5 years) he leaked a lot of stuff, not all of it related to warcrimes.
The 1.5 gigabyte unecrypted file is in the torrents so you could take a look to see what is inside - if it is legal under your jurisdiction.
Also WikiLeaks didn't released all cables that he gave them against - so he failed on that front too.
He also didn't make a dead man's switch that he could leak additional material in case he is captured or convicted - that to use as bargaining chip.
He called himself Bradass83 as a nickname and approached a hacker on im program.
So - he leaked too much, too nondiscriminatory, failed to it properly and was behaving amateurish.
This is not the rule of law. It is a government that is increasingly relying on citizen ignorance to secretly make and implement policy, and on savage reprisals to terrorize those who might expose the process.