If it’s only nominally responsible to the electorate, then what’s the difference?
Yep, leaders meet one another. I am more suspicious of Jill Stein at the table with Putin, Flynn, and a bunch of Putin’s lackeys, ahead of her, heh, inauguration. I think every President has tried to “reboot” the Russia relationship, post USSR collapse.
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I mean, yes, there’s the fact that they are republican-lite radical-allergic capitalists, which I’m sure is at play here, and causing them to reject and attack her for their own intrinsic reasons. However there’s the fact that they are spineless when it comes to the bare-knuckle aspects of campaigning, and they know that the Republicans are just looking for an excuse to turn the projection machine up to 11 on the whole “who’s a Russian puppet now” angle. A big part of it has to be getting out in front of that and diffusing it, which of course they would do, because they don’t have the balls or volume to take them on head-on…
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Federal law regarding whistleblowing makes a pretty clear distinction between someone who:
(a) brings evidence of specific wrongdoing by specific individuals to an inspector general or federal prosecutor, and someone who:
(b) just drops a fuckton of uncurated documents into public access.
It’s the difference in my industry (health care) between bringing a hundred charts showing that a doctor performed unnecessary surgeries to the Medicare OIG, and sending all the hospital’s patient charts, good and bad, for the last six months to Wikileaks. The former will be rewarded, the latter is criminal.
And irrespective of Manning’s intentions, what she did was much more the latter than the former.
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Thank you for eloquently reading my mind. I tend to get emotional when people bring up Manning. I was overseas when the deed was done. A lot of protests happened. A lot of people died in those protests. But people here in the States were cheering for something that they barely read.
Manning was manipulated by Adrian Lamo to divulge secret documents - whose release has a death toll. Manning is not a whistleblower by any definition. The initial intent was validation from someone. Which I understand. I was in the military under DADT, and it was pretty shitty most days. I was also in charge of releasing information. However, I recognize that there is some information that should not be revealed, because the results of that knowledge would cause more destruction.
Manning being in Kuwait for the release would not have seen riots happen outside her base. I did however. Immediately after the Wikileaks publication. Any one with any sense of geopolitics would understand the chaos that would occur from releasing that many documents. If she was concerned, she would have reviewed each of the documents and made that determination for herself. Just releasing hundreds of thousands of documents without any type of review just goes straight into Assauge’s mission of creating chaos in the western world. (Hell, a lot of people were tricked into thinking he was a “good guy” for quite some time.)
I think Manning deserves sympathy, but not idolization.
I want to know just one thing that people learned here in the States that was worth it.
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i think it was the first time people witnessed what a 30mm chain gun could do to people, in glorious FLIR vision. that was part of the leak wasn’t it, that apache gun camera footage?
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And how many chain guns have been taken out of service as a result??
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I disagree with the leak. However, there likely were results stemming from the Apache footage being released, even if those were short of the gun model being taken off duty. The result may just be, more Americans realized what “collateral damage” actually means, on the ground. I still disagree with the situation of this particular leak, mind you.
This world needs more leaders that dare to stand for their principles and do the right thing, no matter the price for themselves, like Mandella, Mahatma or Manning. This world has too many people that sells themselves for political convenience, the system awards those with medals, because they sold themseves to the status quo, to keep the powers in place and feed the military industry at expenses of human. GO CHELSEA, BRAVE WOMAN! TRUE HERO!!
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