It looks like professional political prisoner is a thing now. Chelsea needs to get cards made up.
Need someone to blame? choose Manning. The United States’ scapegoat of choice!
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He is being extradited to the US to be prosecuted under the same US laws for helping her.
You seem to be fine with those laws when they are used against people you don’t like.
Reportedly we will hear from Sweden next week.
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Or fine with laws being applied to those who deserve the charges. You seem to be trying to do everything possible to excuse Assanges alleged offenses.
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I’m talking about the totalitarian US laws, not Swedish laws.
Please point out where I suggested he be tried in the US.
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???
I assumed you were referring to my first comment.
One of the screwups of the Iran-Contra hearings was that, in order to secure their testimony, Congress granted immunity to people who might otherwise have been prosecuted. I believe a grand jury can do the same thing.
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We’re in full agreement.
I also said that the Fifth doesn’t provide protection for the whole experience, and that she was better off, legally, not co-operating.
I was answering someone who asked about the Fifth.
At their discretion, of course. I doubt they’re super-motivated to do it here.
Good.
Now to extradite Assange to Sweden to stand trial for the crimes he’s accused of committing there.
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In both cases it makes sense as a way to run out the clock - in Manning’s case the grand jury ended, in Barr by tying the question up in litigatin past the election.
My understanding is that she did not want to inadvertantly testify against anyone else in her community. The 5th wouldn’t protect against incriminating others – she could be required to answer & unable to limit the scope of the questioning, & so might end up incriminating someone else, or just sharing information about them that they preferred not to share. The more I see & read about Chelsea Manning, the more I admire & respect her.
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Only a couple of years after Watergate Mark Felt was tried and convicted of ordering warrantless covert break-ins of the homes of friends and relatives of Weather Underground members as part of COINTELPRO.
Totally granted, but that wasn’t because of his whistle-blowing, and nobody thought they had caught Deep Throat. (And didn’t he just pay a fine?)
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He paid a fine and served no prison time, and was later pardoned by Reagan. Felt was not known to have been Deep Throat* at that time. If he was so known I suspect Nixon was less likely to have donated to his defense fund and have testified on his behalf. Anyway, the moral is that even being one of the most important whistlblowers in US history doesn’t mean you can’t also be guilty of some scuzzy stuff.
*It still weirds me out that the super-famous leaker is named after a porn movie.
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It’s SO HARD GUYS, I mean can I even go around blowing shit up all over the world that I can’t see clearly and don’t even know what it is without ACCIDENTALLY BECOMING EVIL 
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By release, I don’t mean making public, I mean taking classified materials from its domain and throwing it onto a place it wasn’t supposed to be.
If you’re whistleblowing something you think is illegal or unethical, you absolutely look through materials. You don’t just copy paste root folders or a bunch of random documents onto an external hard drive and hope for the best.
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Snowden was even worse than Manning. If he had just leaked documents related to cellphone metadata harvesting, I’d buy his whole thing about being concerned with constitutional rights and right to privacy. But given that his leaks included monitoring a foreign military, he pretty much lost all credibility with me.
Reality Winner has gotten the closest I think. It’s just that she thought she was releasing some smoking gun in regards to Russian interference and that it would shift the conversation and it turns out to be just some phishing strategy documents.
Sorry, yes - I too often can’t stop myself from adding unnecessary explanations.
Or (looking back at the thread) I should have just explained myself properly in my original response to Bobtato rather than going with the flippant brief response…
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Total unproblem.
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