I’m not 100 percent certain that you’re serious Ygret but, yes, there is no doubt that Manning did not adhere to the rules and standards of the job he chose to, and was trained to do. This was not a job he was drafted into. It was a specialty position that took a good deal of training, and part of that training was a continuous repetition of the repercussions of even talking to friends or family members regarding the information with which they worked – not because the military is an evil Big Brother (that’s a discussion for another time) but because military strategy and decisions were based on it and therefore put their fellow soldiers’ lives in danger.
Look, if Manning had exposed Abu Ghraib or similar wrongdoing I would think this had more to do with patriotism, conscience and honor (and no, the highly edited video of the journalists being killed does not qualify in my mind as anything but a sad result of walking with heavily armed men in a war zone.)
As it is, I think he was just a pitiable man desperate to get out of a terrible situation. Imagine living in a (albeit air conditioned) shipping container in a place where the outside temperatures could be 130 degrees, where the air filled with sandstorms, and you heard mortars bursting overhead and around you, and you worked 80 hour weeks, and you were homesick and alone and your entire job (and so life) was centered on scanning reports of death, dying, and maiming and knowing that saving your own soldiers’ lives meant that other people would die, you too might have cracked and done just about anything if you thought it would get you out of there. He was well aware that he would be imprisoned or executed for what he was doing but he chose to anyway
So, to my mind he did it knowingly, possibly because 1. It was at least a way out of the physical hell he was in. 2. Being punished was a way out of the mental hell he was in – since his self-loathing about his gender confusion drove him into the hyper-macho world of the military (not the act of a man who wants to learn to accept this new aspect of himself) or 3. Through this very public act he wanted to punish the parents or family who had made his life hell as a child.
If the gleeful murderers are the young men in the helicopter, then PLEASE watch the complete, non-edited version. (It’s out there, you can find it.) I do not know those men but I do not believe that they were murderers or psychotic (although they may have been.) What I heard was the backwash of adrenaline that happens when you are alive when you thought a moment ago that you would be blasted into a million bloody, painful pieces.
The men walking with the reporters (who did not have their press credentials on their helmets, BTW, and so were simply to the eyes of a soldier in a war zone, men who were walking with other men who were carrying RPGs, weapons that are expressly intended to shoot down vehicles like the helicopter the soldiers were in.
Yes, they did whoop, like perhaps someone would while playing Call of Duty on the XBox (which I guarantee you those soldiers would have preferred to be doing. They emotionally distanced themselves, or had already had their emotions killed, as a part of being at war.
I completely agree. The conditions in which Manning was kept were beyond reason. I can understand the need for no sheets or blankets since he would obviously be on suicide watch but there was no reason to force him to sleep without any clothing. That was torture and it was morally wrong (although I don’t know if it was wrong according to military statutes.) That should be looked into and rectified.
I think it is entirely possible that the apology is sincere. That doesn’t mean objectively he should not have done it. It means his motivations for doing it came from a difficult place for him, and he regrets it. Somewhere between the hero and the villain, is a person who has and will suffer immensely now.
Right, so it’s possible that all of the people concerned here were operating in a dissociative state due to trauma. So are an awful lot of “gleeful murderers” not in war. The problem still exists though. We don’t really need to believe that the men in the helicopter were hatched from demon eggs to see what is wrong with the situation.
You could be right, although the prosecutor may also just have chosen not to take that tack. Possible reasons for such a decision could be
They didn’t need it, since there was enough evidence to put him away for life, or at least long enough to deter other possible leakers;
Because I believe that charge could have led to Manning’s execution, something that probably no one would have been happy about;
Doing so would have meant opening up that information to the court in public (meaning even more, and more detailed confidential or top secret information being exposed),
Doing so would likely have included information about the soldiers who had been injured or killed because of it and create even further issues with the families of those soldiers.
I’m sorry, but I find this incredibly disappointing.
He didn’t shoot the judge the finger, grab a lighter and self-immolate himself in the courtroom, but I don’t think a lighter was handy.
His apology doesn’t alter his good deeds for critical thinkers. And people who already think of Manning as a traitor aren’t the kind of intelligent people who tend to adjust their opinions with new information anyway.
Manning didn’t put the genie back into the bottle by apologizing. And he sure as hell didn’t reverse time and render useless all the good he’s done.
Sorry, but even patriotic heros are human. If this apology helps to lighten his sentence so we get to see his ass out of prison before he dies, then I will consider it well worth your tragic disappointment.
He saw injustices as bad or worse than what happened at Abu Ghraib and wanted people to know. There’s no evidence anyone was harmed, and a good deal of wrongdoing was exposed.
That wrongdoing is what is important. The way it was exposed is important only in that it illustrates the incompetency inherent in our national security systems.
I’ll be honest, I really don’t know the specifics about what Manning exposed (other than lots of embarrassing gossip about various ambassadors and the like and the infamous, edited helicopter video.)
I’m 100 percent not being snarky here – I’ve just honestly not read about it. (I stopped following the story, in part because Assange’s picture causes in me the same involuntary nausea and revulsion that I feel when I see one of Bush. (I think I have an allergy to smarm.) And, yes, that part was snarky.
Honestly, could someone list for me the atrocities worse than Abu Ghraib that Manning exposed?
There have been ongoing protests worldwide including 40 cities in Germany alone. It makes the numbers difficult to quantify since it’s not a bunch of people all collected into one place at once.
Of course, this has happened despite an overall mainstream media blackout on Manning during most of his trial.
.[quote=“Elagie, post:21, topic:7316”]
Look, if Manning had exposed Abu Ghraib or similar wrongdoing I would think this had more to do with patriotism, conscience and honor (and no, the highly edited video of the journalists being killed does not qualify in my mind as anything but a sad result of walking with heavily armed men in a war zone.) …
… If the gleeful murderers are the young men in the helicopter, then PLEASE watch the complete, non-edited version. (It’s out there, you can find it.) I do not know those men but I do not believe that they were murderers or psychotic (although they may have been.) What I heard was the backwash of adrenaline that happens when you are alive when you thought a moment ago that you would be blasted into a million bloody, painful pieces…
[/quote]
I did. The helicopter crew was standing off from a considerable distance —there is a significant delay between the sound of gunfire and the effects thereof. They were in no danger from their video game targets.
Nor was it the deaths of the reporters that was so disturbing — that looked like an understandable mistake, as you say. It was shooting up the van (incidentally containing children) that turned up to assist while still targetting those dying in the street that was disturbing. That was the war crime, that was what made the whooping pilots murderers and demonstrated their lack of concern for the rules of war. The fact that they are out there now, unpunished, and nothing changed also demonstrates the USA’s failure to respect the rules of law. That is the ‘Abu Ghraib’ level wrongdoing that needed exposing.
Hey, I’m not saying he should have done anything - I tried to make that
clear, clearly I should have written it in uppercase.
Easy for me to say from my armchair. Just telling it how it is. That
testimony will likely become a weapon used against people like him,
especially by the media.
OK, I can see that. Certainly no one wants dead children. If he had released only that info (even if it included the reporters’ deaths – in full context) I would have been behind that. And the soldiers should have had to answer for that (including whether they knew that there were children in the van.) Do we know for certain that they weren’t called on it in a military court? (Busted down ranks, etc.) I still don’t think it is up there with Abu Ghriaib though – certainly not ‘worse than’. Even in non-war situations, things that are done in the heat of the moment are always judged less harshly than calmly planned violence and torture. War turns my stomach, torture makes me lose faith in the human race.
I was serious, but I don’t feel that your response was serious. First of all, he didn’t release any docs that endangered his fellow soldiers, as has been stated by many in government from VP Biden, to Secy Gates on down. Second, since releasing the docs did not endanger his fellow soldiers, you haven’t mentioned one piece of evidence that he didn’t do his job competently.
I also find your armchair psychoanalysis odd and unrealistic. You don’t really know what caused him to release the docs. It does appear he was trying to get out of the military, and he clearly has gender issues, but beyond that I think its largely impossible to analyze someone when you have never met them. He says he released the docs due to a crisis of conscience. I have no reason to disbelieve him, but also realize that is likely not the whole story. No one really knows the whole story except Bradley Manning and as far as I’m concerned, he did a service to the American people by helping make us aware of many criminal acts our government has taken in our names. If you add up all the disclosures he made, they are easily as important as the exposure of Abu Ghraib. Anyhow, we can agree to disagree. I still haven’t heard any evidence that he didn’t do the job he was assigned while in the military.
We certainly can agree to disagree but by releasing top secret documents, he clearly was not doing his job. I don’t know how better to explain it. That pretty much is the definition of the job. I don’t know how good he was at his job in terms of filing reports or doing analysis (although I will say that he can’t have been doing it very well since I know others in the same job at the same time who were promoted much faster.) Please cite what exact things he released that were worse than Abu Ghirab. I did ask and the only thing I heard was that a van was shot up (that happened to have children in it – not that the helicopter pilots knew that, or could know that) at the same time as the reporters were killed. That is tragic and sad but NOT worse than Abu Ghirab.
