Bradley Manning sentenced to years in jail

boing
41

Yeah, but how about we talk about actual … you know…justice?

He never tortured anybody, yet he himself was tortured, surely you see that as a more severe crime, right? Is justice being served there?

How about what was revealed to us, including . . . yes, murder. Inexcusable actions that lead to innocent people dying. . . are the people involved being held accountable?

And what about the people who have been lying to us ABOUT what is being done in our name? I didn’t vote for any of that, and that’s certainly far more severe a crime, to us a position of authority to deceive your voters. . how’s that going?

If you’re going to obsess over punishment, at least we need to get some priorities out there, right?

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42

This was going on LONG before Bradley Manning entered the scene, and as a pacifist, we screamed about it from the tallest towers and were called liberal kooks… by OTHER liberals. War involves murder by its very nature. The US’s method of war has involved murder at least back to World War I, and probably further.

Of course this whole thing is a massive injustice, but that’s the business Manning was IN. So am I surprised or shocked that he played with fire and got burnt? No. War is an evil thing and results in a lot of needless victims.

I AM surprised that the same “war machine” gave him under 1/2 what the prosecutor asked for, and around 1/3rd the max… after knocking the max from 135 to 90. I AM surprised that the war machine did not find him guilty of aiding the enemy, because I was CERTAIN they would have.

Again, what the fuck do you think goes on in a warzone? Do you realize what our military is trained to do? If they’re NOT here, defending our borders, then they are somewhere else defending our interests… and what do you think our interests REALLY ARE with Iraq?

Welcome to the military the rest of us “liberal kooks” were bitching about on 9/30/2012 after the authorization bills passed and the world the rest of us “liberal kooks” were bitching about when Patriot passed. Sorry it took everyone else so long to get here.

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43

I think the Iraq war was a total freaking waste on every single level imaginable, and all of the lives lost on all sides, including the AT LEAST hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, probably more like millions, who died as indirect results of the war, is sickening.

But did I miss something? Where is the murder that was revealed? Are you referring to an Apache pilot who shot a bunch of civilians and journalists? You do realize that in every single war, MANY MANY innocent people are killed, right? It’s usually called “collateral damage” or some other newspeak. And its awful, just awful.

However… it’s not murder. It’s an inevitable part of war. And just because it’s awful, and Maning revealed some instances of it in particular, does not, in my opinion, bring him to the level of “freedom fighter for justice and revealer of MURDER” that his advocates seem to want to make him out to be. If it took that Apache video for you to know that lots of innocent people get killed in war, frankly, you’re retarded.

44

You might be assuming a couple of things there, I’ll just chalk it up to enthusiasm and passion, along with a little frustration.

You’re right, this is madness, and it’s been going on a long, long time. We’ve been pretty much at a constant state of war since 1980, and really only had a few gaps going back to Eisenhower’s ‘Military Industrial Complex’ speech way back in . . 1961? Wow. And he believed in the military, unlike many of us.

The human side of me knows that a person is a person, and the fact that we’re okay with all these people dying because the’re far away or look different is very disconcerting, we know about Dunbar’s Number and our Monkeyspheres, yet we can’t figure out a way to work around them?

The pragmatic side of me looks at what these wars have accomplished . . . and while arguably we helped prevent something really bad in WWII, there’s not much good since then, not only are we horrible nationbuilders, but we often side with the wrong sides and end up making a lot of enemies and creating more terrorists (how many Iraqi born ‘terrorists’ were there before we invaded Iraq? How many now?)

I sometimes struggle to keep perspective, how do you fight something like this? That’s actually WHY I brought up the other people that committed actual atrocities rather than just revealing true things (which should never have been a crime).

The purist in me dislikes people like Manning and Snowden, because they were in part complicit in the problem before turning a corner. I have to fight that sometimes, my beloved taught me that all people are really complicated (and interesting) and it’s far too easy to dehumanize and turn them into cartoons.

The person I am now sees another problem, we make it so very hard for people to change their minds and change their ways for the better. We punish them for coming clean (often saying ‘I can’t do anything, that’s the law’) rather than motivating everybody to grow. There are so many layers of fundamental flaws I’m tired of raging at individuals, everybody should get the chance at forgiveness.

Anything else, and we close our minds and start to fall into our own little traps and get angry. It hurts us all.

45

“Dishonorably discharged.”

Like beauty, dishonour is in the eyes of the beholder.

46

end of thread.

47

“How do we know which laws are real ones?”

There’s a secret list…

48

I believe that Bradley Manning deserved the sentence that he received. When you enlist in the military, you incur certain obligations, and one of those obligations is that you don’t get to decide whether its right to disclose classified information. If at some point, he concluded that he could not participate in an armed conflict, there were means at his disposal that would lead to a discharge. Though I personally disagree with the decision to invade Iraq, I believe that we were correct in seeking to find those responsible for 9/11. Manning betrayed his country and should be punished.

49

Minor detail, but wasn’t the Iraq invasion about the apparent “clear and present” threat of weapons of mass destruction, and completely unrelated to the World Trade Center attack?

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50

Beyond the general problem with jailing a whistleblower…

They discharged him. He is now a civilian. Doesn’t this mean that he should be immediately turned over to the civilian court system? The military no longer has jurisdiction (admittedly, the concept of “jurisdiction” seems to be somewhat confused in the USA…).

51

Does it matter from solitary? If you think the government’s retribution is complete, I’d have to call you a gleeful optimist.

52

You say that, but GWB no less than 20 times linked Iraq to the events of 9/11 and Iraq to Al Qaeda as an imputeus to war. The Downing Street Memos show that there was a concerted effort by the US and UK governments to tie Iraq to the events of 9/11. If not in actuality, than in appearance.

The authorization for the military prosecution of those responsible for 9/11 were passed quickly by the House and Senate, and signed by the President, who made statements indicating that Iraq and Afghanistan will be brought to justice for harboring the terrorists who destroyed the world trade center and pentagon, and ended the lives of those americans onboard the four flights.

Also, they lied about the WMD’s and knew they were lying from day one.

53

Nah, sadly, he’s not discharged yet. He will be at the end of his sentence. He was busted down to PFC 1 and his pay was removed. He will not get a pension. He will not be eligible for VA insurance. After his sentence is served, he will be discharged dishonorably from the military.

54

I honestly haven’t been following this case that closely as US politics makes no sense to me. I read a Noam Chomsky piece about RECD and the tiny percentage of the population that hold any influence over what is supposed to be a democratic nation - pickled my brain.

Anyway, regardless of what her intentions were, what did Manning achieve? Compared to whatever she achieved, how much worse did she make things?

We can read our own intentions into her actions, but could she not have handled it better?

My gut instinct is that what she did was traitorous and even if the White House had politely thanked her for her contribution, she still should have gone to jail. Or do two wrongs now make a right? Is that what we’re doing now, because it’s going to simplify to hell a lot of boring old police procedures. Presumably planting evidence is okay, if you see the ends justifying the means.

55

Thanks. That’s an interesting way for them to get out of it. Still problematic as hell, though.

56

On the one hand it’s time people owned up to what war entails and realize that when you support it, you’re asking for shocking atrocities to happen. But they’re still shaped by culture; there is a reason rounding up and exterminating whole populations has become less common. Crap like murdering civilian responders and torturing prisoners is normal, but only because we allow it to be such, and I don’t see how we benefit from giving people who engage in them a pass.

I don’t know that anyone ever showed any real harm from what Manning released; if its benefits have been limited, I think that’s partly on how people responded. And the idea that it’s ok to violate confidentiality to expose wrong-doing is central to whistle-blowing, so while I suppose one might question how appropriate it was in this case, calling it “two wrongs making a right” is essentially denying it’s ever appropriate.

57

But the crux here is what you said. Is diplomacy messy as heck? Yes, and most folks with a clue know that. Most accounts of the leaked State Dept. memos I’ve looked at seem to generally come to the consensus that they all-in-all made the State Dept. look quite competent and not the other way around.

As far as exposing specific incidents of “collateral damage in a war zone” again I would say, if you don’t know that war entails a TON of this (and frankly, significantly less now than any other time in documented history), you’re daft. And so releasing classified information that attests to this in some particular cases is really not “whistle-blowing,” it’s releasing classified information when you had a job that you DAMN WELL should know had to do with killing people en masse, and oftentimes as a byproduct, innocents! Manning cannot make the claim that this was revealing information that wasn’t really widely known already. And when s/he signed up for service, s/he should have known damn well that the oath s/he took meant you don’t do this, and you WILL be FIERCELY prosecuted if you do.

58

Of course we know that. What I disagree with is the vapid notion that this means it’s all par for the course, that one should never look at incidents of “collateral damage” with a questioning eye and ask if the soldiers and leaders acted appropriately. We’re talking about a case where children were shot, other soldiers thought was wrong, and the investigation seems to have covered up details, as Cowicide spells out. But war, so you would have us look the other way.

Do you know why these sorts of things are less common now than in other times? It’s because good people oppose them. Kudos to Manning for trying, and shame on anyone who pretends that just because we all know war is awful, nobody is responsible for what they do after it’s declared.

59

You seem to be missing my point, which is that people who think that Manning should not have faced any sentencing due to this being a case of “whistle-blowing” are being quite unrealistic. S/he took an oath, broke it, and got in trouble. There are plenty of ways to fight the horrors of war (such as, let’s not have them if they’re completely pointless) than encouraging service people to break confidentiality oaths in an attempt to “whistle blow” on things that we all know are going on anyway during war.

It’s just really tough for me to see Manning as a “hero/ine” in this circumstance, when I take what s/he said about largely feeling compelled to do this due to lots of other issues that were going on at the time (which are well documented) at face value.

60

See, I’m not missing your point, I’m saying you’re being callously wrong in presenting gunning down children and covering up the circumstances as not worthy of the news and no reason anyone should get upset. Breaking an oath to conceal that is the smallest violation that happened here, the one that hasn’t hurt anyone and the one taken with the hope of ending rather than allowing such misery - and yet it’s the only one you recognize as notable.

Of course opposing pointless wars is an important start in preventing such atrocities, but that in no way absolves us from taking measures against them should war happen anyway. As I said, business as usual is defined by what we treat as such; whatever her issues, Manning is the one here who was at least trying to do the right thing.