I was more worried about the legal line than the moral line with my earlier commentary because of the grand jury aspect. They’ve destroyed plenty of trust in the way they handled this. That is the distinction I was making in one of the posts about bad press versus not press. But even then, it is hardly unheard of for rather other prestigious news outlets to knowingly publish information from a foreign intelligence agency, it just comes with higher sensitivity and verification requirements.
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That is an interesting point, and yes, historically, it does make sense and supports the notion that, in a sense, a post on Facebook is an “act of the press.”
The problem, I think, may be the following. In order to plaster one-sheets around your city, you had to have access to a press. That itself was privileged, to a degree. It took effort, and resources. There was more that had to go into that action, than, say, any single person Tweeting something. A Tweet, to my mind, is muuuuuch closer to speech between individuals, than an “act of press,” even in that historical scenario you cite.
The smartphone has quickly evolved to act as essentially a new organ of the human creature. In my opinion it would be accurate to describe this as a literal evolution of the species into something we can probably call “homo informaticus” or something. It is a cybernetic, hive-mind-linked entity, and it now exists. It is very new, and while we take it for granted in many ways because we are, indeed, a highly adaptable species, this doesn’t mean we’re using it intelligently or maturely. Kind of like burning millions of years of carbon and pumping it into the atmosphere. Oh, we’ll come up with a way of doing it and finding utility in it, but that’s probably not a good thing.
So, this is why Mindysan’s point of the need to have actual societal debates about such things – like this, woot! – is so important right now. Because not nearly enough of that has gone on for the past 25 years of the explosion of the net into public life. We had better acknowledge what is going on – including the literal evolution I spoke of – and stat, or it is going to eat us up.
It’ll eat us up in any case, but I would really take the Brave New World version over Mad Max. Probably others would pick differently, given those options. Heh, maybe the world of “Mad Max” is really just one of those “reserves” they have in Brave New World. Both are going on at once! Ha, never thought about that, lol.
If you “study journalism” as you said, you should look up “carbon paper”.
The history and applicability of “press freedom” laws cover “the lonely pamphleteer” and it has from the start.
We might be in a new age (since every generation has been), but the bar for whether something is “press” has always extended to handwritten little things. It’s whether it’s news made public, you shouldn’t get hung up on the media.
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I don’t know if people realize this but if she is pre-op or non-op, prison management doesn’t give a damn and under law doesn’t have to - they will put her in with the male population with no supervision.
I don’t agree with not testifying to a grand-jury but I have mad respect for her to be willing to go to prison for her beliefs, especially if the above is the situation because that would be pure living hell.
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It’s a valid point.
The question is – does it continue to serve us, in today’s environment? Maybe we need to rethink things. Not sure we do, but it’s definitely worth some thought.
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Contempt of court is generally like that, however this one also ends six months after the grand jury does, and grand juries have a limited life, I think about a year plus a single six month extension for a federal grand jury. So in theory this is a max of two years minus however long that grand jury has existed already. Then again I’m not a lawyer (or even paralegal) so I could be incorrect.
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Manning deserves a Medal, not this rubbish. You have to admire someone who has been imprisoned and tortured before, and steps right up to be taken into custody by the same people again. That is incredible bravery.
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In general it demonstrates security-culture awareness and legal cognizance.
There’s many a good reason to plead the fifth…
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Trump is President, police collaboration with Nazis is on display every week, and a large chunk of the Supreme Court are known rapists and/or fascists.
And yet half of the folks here appear to still believe that the US legal system is based on “justice” and that “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear”.
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Let me see if I understand this - Chelsea Manning is a hero because she is a whistleblower, but when called on to actually tell what she knows, she is a hero for not saying anything.
I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
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Did you read the post? She objects to the nature of the secret grand jury, and she already testified at length about the topic in 2013.
Whether you agree with her about the utility of secret grand juries, you have to admire her courage to make this stand given what she suffered during her last incarceration.
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I am utterly flummoxed by that as well…
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It looks like it. The main point is that it was all after Chelsea was caught. I really don’t think that she would know anything useful, and do think that this is about intimidation and causing fear and paranoia in left wing groups.
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wait, what?!? because she made warcrimes public?
good grief.
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I’m not excusing war crimes in the least when I say the following. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of Iraqi people have died due to the US’ actions from the first Gulf War through today, and it makes me sick. I was in the streets when that shit really picked up after 9/11. One of the worst mistakes the USA has ever made. And that’s saying something.
But come on. We didn’t need Manning’s leak to know that. War has a way of doing these things! Any time we support war, this is EXACTLY what it comes to. Always. Universally. It’s war. It’s a horrible, horrible thing.
But Manning signed up for the military, and what — didn’t KNOW this?! Give me a break. The military breaks things. Kills things. People. Often, innocent people. THAT’S what Manning signed up for. If she didn’t know it, she was a goddamn idiot. Which is not an excuse.
But it’s what she DID do. And then she took an oath. Which she violated. Which under some circumstances, I would support. Like if she had curated the material she leaked. But she didn’t.
So shit on me all you want. But you are defending someone as a hero who voluntarily joined an inherently murderistic organization. Which I’m not even judging. And then broke an oath, which to me, is something pretty heavy. Knowing full well what she signed up for. She was treated like shit, to be sure. But I’m just not of the camp that feels being treated like shit inherently makes one a hero.
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Got it. You’re mad at someone for breaking an oath to, what you call, a murderistic organization.
I bet you hated Sammy Gravano, too.
(These two sentences together in the same paragraph are redonculous. Thank you for your service.)
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People can be naive. People can trust that institutions do bad things for justifiable reasons. You seem to be hinging a lot on defining what the military meant to Chelsea, and then pivoting that to “she gets what she deserves, because she knew what she signed up for.”
All of that, of course, really only applies to what happened with her original charges. Even if you were correct.
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A reminder that antiwar resistance from within the US military is not a new thing:
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