An old coworker of mine was active military during this event and also was in Manning’s unit. His stance is that Manning put many soldiers in danger, with the following quote:
On an individual level, reports don’t say much. If you read through the reports, you can find precise grid coordinates of almost every base in Afghanistan, discussion of our IMINT and SIGINT capabilities, from which weaknesses can be inferred, our own troop casualty reports, and PII. It would also expose bad intelligence we were tracking that the enemy could reinforce through counterintelligence activities. While we can’t interview the bodies we counterfired on after having Chinese rockets rain down on us daily, the fact that the Taliban published videos of themselves using content from WikiLeaks is evidence enough that Manning is a traitor.
I don’t really know how to feel about this. Was Manning’s info worth that?
Time to step back a moment and consider how Manning is going to survive freedom.
This is not going to be easy.
She will need help. More than a discussion thread on the internet can give her. I can but hope that she gets all the support she needs, and just the healthy part of attention.
But I doubt the latter. This is not going to be easy…
If Trump did order them not to release her, she’d apply for (and be speedily granted) a writ of Habeas Corpus from the federal courts. Detained without legal authority at the whim of the executive is the paradigm case of what the writ is for.
Of course, it’s fairly tricky to actually enforce the writ against a heavily-armed military if they choose to ignore it (see Ex parte Merryman), but the law is pretty clear.
Basically. Presidential pardons don’t set any precedent whatsoever. They are 100% arbitrary.[quote=“nemomen, post:54, topic:93115, full:true”]
Amusingly the one party this is actually not in line is the US who has never filed charges against Assange (though this does make a paranoid pretence for his dodging rape charges).
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I don’t think drone strikes or CIA black sites require charges to be filed (not saying that’s where Assange is headed, just pointing out that no one outside of America puts any stock in American law).
Assange sexually assaulted women in Sweden (and, one imagines, in other places). I think Sweden is considerably better on prosecuting sexual assault than English-speaking nations, so maybe if he went to Sweden he’d actually end up charged, tried and convicted there. It’s possible that the charges against him are both valid and an American-influenced effort to discredit/imprison him. I’m awfully biased by what I see from sexual assault cases in my own country, but I think the odds he is punished for the crimes he actually committed are extremely slim regardless of what he does.
Yes. America does systematic evil all over the world from using bribery and threats to try to stop international action on climate change to deals to training Egyptian torturers under the guise of training peacekeepers. Chelsea Manning didn’t paint a target on the backs of Americans, she revealed the extent to which the American government paints targets on the backs of Americans.
Uh… look at the, um … uh, “bright” side?
Um… sure it’s 17 bills but, uh, only 10 states?
Some of them might not pass?
I’m really trying here.
(Actually there is kind of a bright side in that I checked some of the bills and they didn’t pass, though I didn’t check all of them, and more have presumably have been introduced in the last year or the last few weeks)
ETA: I wrote all this and forgot to say, “Hooray! Obama actually did something about Chelsea Manning!” I did not think that was going to happen.
(Admittedly, this line of equivocation from Assange was fairly easy to see coming. The Wikileaks faithful on Twitter were already trying it out mere minutes after the news broke about Manning.)
And prior to and after that? You do know that we actively attempted to bring down the revolution just after the first world war? And let’s not forget that the Soviets had a treaty with the Nazis until the nazis decided they hated those commies and invaded, making us their allies?
You’re sooo vaiin, you probably think they’re all out to geeetttt youuuuu…
