Bradley Manning - 35yrs in the slammer :(

The Law and whistleblowing are separate things entirely, in likelihood of a serious whisleblow, the law has to do its job to be consistent where it can be.

The public may not care about any of this at all, but it really is not about the public, as they quite frankly are happy (more or less) with the dullness of their lives, hell a lot people here realise the pains of having relatives or perhaps older folks with a million programs on their computers, they do not bother researching what is useful or not...they just click the OK button.

But to get a computer was/still is a prevailing social hype, people do it because other people do it, that is the level of most folks in society and serious matters are left to the Philanthropic/Machiavellian among us.

There are the middle of ground folk of course, but usually only rarely opportunistic, so one cannot really count on them, they are...the unknown variable.

This is likely to change slowly as more and more people are educated to a good standard, but even intelligent people can fall into apathy.
 
CaNsA said:
Oh that's ok then, I didn't realise a politician had told people that the public can now get the names and addresses of "State Department officials & U.S. military officials"

Nice work there sherlock.

Now where's this evidence of "dangerous info" ?
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As ii said googles plenty of it, iota not just public names is it.

How about assigner agreeing the leaks resulted in
http://www.thenation.com/article/165758/accusing-wikileaks-murder#
There's litterly thousands of sites and articles discussing it.

Where the evidence they scrutinised and edited article, like you suggest.

And how about Taliban thanking wiikealeaks for the info. Which they used against tribal leaders.

How do you not think releasing the names and locaons of afghan leaders and people who helped the Us as an issue, of course it's an issue and taht is there fault. There was ZERO reason to release such articles in the first place and even less reason too include such info.

thousands of documents in the archive do identify Afghans by name, family, location, and ideology.
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I think he was very naive to think he would not be punished for breaking his oath

I imagine he will be released pretty early for good behavior


First rule of whistle blowing is you better be pretty darn sure that the thing you are leaking is big enough to get you off the hook for breaking the rules, and in his case - it just wasnt
 
EdGey said:
I wonder if it was worth it..
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Of course not, even he says it wasn't.

In a statement during the sentencing hearing, Pte Manning told the court martial at Fort Meade, Maryland that "the last three years have been a learning experience for me".

He said he mistakenly believed he could change the world for the better, and that in retrospect, he should have worked "inside the system".
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He should be able to apply for parole after 1/3rd of the sentence so that's in about 9 years time (35 / 3 - 3 yrs so far). Still, 12 years for a whistle blower really sets precedent, even if he didn't go about it the greatest way.
 
McGray said:
The marines who killed 24 Iraqi civilians including 7 children and a 76yr old man in a wheelchair at Haditha got a total of zero custodial time.

To use a military acronym, FUBAR.
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People follow law like a religion nowadays it's become the new 10 commandments only there's more of them, "it's legal so it must be right, it's illegal so it must be wrong".

Much of what the Nazi's did in Germany was perfectly legal at the time, those German's who 'did the right thing by their conscience' were hunted down and killed by the Gestapo for being enemies of the state.

IMO transparency is crucial to a healthy democracy.
 
Glaucus said:
As ii said googles plenty of it, iota not just public names is it.

How about assigner agreeing the leaks resulted in
http://www.thenation.com/article/165758/accusing-wikileaks-murder#
There's litterly thousands of sites and articles discussing it.

Where the evidence they scrutinised and edited article, like you suggest.

And how about Taliban thanking wiikealeaks for the info. Which they used against tribal leaders.

How do you not think releasing the names and locaons of afghan leaders and people who helped the Us as an issue, of course it's an issue and taht is there fault. There was ZERO reason to release such articles in the first place and even less reason too include such info.
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As if a bunch of mad men like the taliban needed wikileaks to kill and oppress the locals who might wish to stand against them. Those kind of people don't need proof to see you an an enemy or collaborator, any more than our governments needed to; if they think you're against them they'll kill you any how, it means very little to them.
 
jumpy said:
As if a bunch of mad men like the taliban needed wikileaks to kill and oppress the locals who might wish to stand against them. Those kind of people don't need proof to see you an an enemy or collaborator, any more than our governments needed to; if they think you're against them they'll kill you any how, it means very little to them.
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They don't need proof, that's not he point. They also won't know who stands against them.
Wikileaks gave them there names and locations, for what reasons, these weren't even documents with cover ups in them or anything of public interest.
There was no resin to leak this info in the first place and no reason to include that information.
That is down to manning and why he should get a lot longer than he did.
If he had only released info of public interest and at least tried to remove such information, then I would probably support his leaks, although he would still have to do the jail time.

He didnt, he didnt give any thought about anything, he just took a whole load of info and dumped it. 99% of it of no importance to the public, doesn't contain cover ups or anything else.
 
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do_ron_ron said:
He got longer for revealing war crimes than others got for committing them.
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That's spot on.

There's obviously a split opinion on this and whilst I can see both sides of the argument, when the above statement by do_ron_ron is true, it's hard to justify a governments actions.

If the US had got leaks from the Chinese or Russians, do you think they'd have said "oh that's wrong, send that information back this instance".

Civilian casualties are an unfortunate thing as someone alluded to above. Well the same could be said for secret service lives/military lives being lost as well 'cos if you go spying, don't expect the other side to not spy either.
 
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