Everyone who is given access to classified information in the military is educated about the consequences of failing to protect it. He knew he was breaking the law. Even though he may have felt that what he was doing was right, he will have to face the consequences for his actions.

However, why should one bother with all that since putting Manning on trial is so much easier?

It barely makes anyone look back.

I have little sympathy for anyone who divulges classified information. Maybe that's just because I was in the military and still respect its laws.

What Manning may or may not have done is minor in comparison to the whole situation that happened in Iraq.

Do you think that the war in Iraq was legal? If it was not legal, should the soldiers have disobeyed the orders to invade Iraq? Further, if they failed to disobey illegal orders, what responsibility do they bear for all of the deaths in Iraq?

Respecting the laws of the military surely means not killing innocent people, right?

am I then free to break the same law? I'm pretty sure I know how an attorney would answer that question.

The legal term is "Selective Prosecution."

The government regularly protects those who break the law when it serves them and prosecutes those that attempt to serve the public.

http://politics.salon.com/2011/10/10/the_real_danger_from_classified_leaks/

And for the record, yes, the Iraq "war" (the U.S. hasn't been in an official "war" since WWII...really) was, and is, illegal. Under international law, and more specifically the U.N. Charter, the invasion of a sovereign nation that poses no immediate or demonstrable threat to the aggressor nation is prohibited.

Looked at from a Constitutional perspective, the passage "all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land" would seem to make it binding upon the U.S. to abide by the U.N.'s rules.

This all doesn't even touch on the legality of Manning's extended solitary confinement without charge or access to representation, the legal and unconstitutional black-hole that are military tribunals, the Justice Department's abuse of whistle-blowers via the Espionage Act, the Pentagon's own early admission that none of the documents leaked by Manning were that damaging to operations, and so on.

Do I think the war in Iraq was legal? Yes. Certainly not moral or in our best interests, but I believe it was legal. Congress authorized it, and our then-president was commander of our armed forces. I believe that makes the next two questions moot.

I would certainly hope that respecting the laws of the military means not killing innocent people.

...but then....when has the U.S. EVER obeyed such law? It gets what it wants...and by ALL means possible.

That's evidence that we're a rogue state with a rogue government. It was illegal by international law, and under our own Constitution. It was a war that everybody outside of Congress officially called a war. Congress evaded declaring it by name just because if it had called it what it was there would have been no evading that the action is illegal. It was Orwellian doublespeak.

Congress has the power to declare war. Beyond a narrow scope and theater, military action outside our borders is illegal. By declaring war by another name, Congress acted illegally. Democrats and Republicans.

Compared to our government, most especially the Bush administration who pushed the Iraq war, Manning should be canonized. I could only hope Obama or some president pardons him, and I don't have any real hope of that. It's less likely than Bush being prosecuted, I'm afraid.

Anyone who calls themselves a Democrat and doesn't support Manning should be ashamed. He's a hero in the same way Daniel Ellsberg was.

either.

Manning is facing the UCMJ - which doesn't have jurisdiction over civilians, not even the Commander in Chief.

And after you go after Bush & Cheney, what would you do about the President that ordered the strike on a US Citizen who had not been to trial? What would you do about the former President who was tried in absentia and convicted of War Crimes for ordering the bombing of Serbia?

And given that the VP is not in the Chain of Command and is not a Deputy Commander in Chief, you'll find that orders go directly from POTUS to the Cabinet Secretaries. The most you'll get Cheney for is being ugly & dressing funny.

You (conveniently) missed the point about the general concept being justice.

What do you think? (Again, the argument revolves around justice.) Is it just to overlook wrongs because someone is "on your team"? Was said president guilty of war crimes? Was the trial a fair trial? Was there legitimate evidence indicating that there were war crimes?
Etc.

So, you believe that Dick Cheney is blameless in the whole Iraq war debacle? An investigation might show otherwise. Without looking back, one will never know.

I believe they should all be prosecuted. And you're wrong; the Constitutional role of VP does not acquit Cheney. If he was running a shadow government where people in official positions were taking orders from him, the charge could be criminal conspiracy. And if he was ordering torture and people were obeying it no matter what his official role was, that is illegal by federal statute with a heavy penalty.

And its not a matter of what will happen or what's practical. Its whether you should be passionate about wanting justice or to be emphatic about resignation. Pinochet was prosecuted in Chile. That looked impossible. If public sentiment toward prosecution becomes passionate and stays that way, it will happen.

For myself, I'm not going to let it die no matter how common sense resignation and "moving forward" is.

Try this instead, "the officer wasn't impressed when I pointed out that he let powerful, well connected drivers break the law and only ticketed lowly average citizens like myself."

There is a difference.

does not change the fact that Manning allegedly passed thousands of classified products to someone who wasn't authorized to receive them, and who put them on the Internet.

Or is this another round of the claims that Manning somehow "exposed war crimes" even though he didn't?

What TheWraith said.

Yes, it is wrong to betray a trust -- but what real secrets, what information of future strategic importance is Manning accused of revealing?

I have read books on the spying, espionage, double agents that the US had in WWII. It was quite astounding and very successful. Obviously, information about military capacity or troop movements or equipment should be classified if it could jeopardize life or security in the future. But how does that justify classifying as secret the kinds of gossip and information about civilian matters having nothing to do with military strategy that Wikileaks released.

Is every single gram of it a live attack plan for Normandy? Obviously not. That doesn't mean it's not confidential, or that it doesn't have intelligence value. Often what facts or information a government is curious about, even when it's freely available information, can give a lot of insight into what that government is thinking or what they already know. Which is not to say that the documents didn't contain really, really classified information. A non-theoretical example: the US conspiring with the Pakistani government to help secure their nuclear material and weapons, a fact that doesn't sit very well in Pakistan.

A slightly more abstract example: during World War II, the Germans announced to the world that they'd discovered the remains of thousands of Polish military officers executed by the Soviet Union in 1940 when the Soviets controlled half of Poland, and therefore according to them this proved both the barbarism of the communists and that the Allies were subservient to the vicious Slavs, and that all decent Poles should support Germany in the war. The Soviets retorted that it was obviously another German war crime--not a hard sell given the use of "Action Groups" led by the SS on the eastern front to execute entire villages.

That was all information available to the public, no big deal if cables were published about it, right? Little problem: Although many people treated the German claims as propaganda (for which it was certainly used), the US and UK both knew that the Germans were being 100% completely accurate about the discovery of dead Polish officers and who killed them, because the UK had intercepted and broken the encrypted signals from the German motorized signals regiment which found the first mass grave.

If your argument is that these cables should be unclassified because they're all publicly available information (which they're not), that loses something based on the fact that publicly available information is, you know, publicly available, and you don't need to tap in to classified communications to get it. Also, Manning's defenders can't have it both ways; either he revealed the most important cache of information since the Dead Sea Scrolls, or it's all unclassified gossip. It can't be both.

revealed the Dead Sea Scrolls.

As for this:

A slightly more abstract example: during World War II, the Germans announced to the world that they'd discovered the remains of thousands of Polish military officers executed by the Soviet Union in 1940 when the Soviets controlled half of Poland, and therefore according to them this proved both the barbarism of the communists and that the Allies were subservient to the vicious Slavs, and that all decent Poles should support Germany in the war. The Soviets retorted that it was obviously another German war crime--not a hard sell given the use of "Action Groups" led by the SS on the eastern front to execute entire villages.

That was all information available to the public, no big deal if cables were published about it, right? Little problem: Although many people treated the German claims as propaganda (for which it was certainly used), the US and UK both knew that the Germans were being 100% completely accurate about the discovery of dead Polish officers and who killed them, because the UK had intercepted and broken the encrypted signals from the German motorized signals regiment which found the first mass grave.

Concealing the truth equals lying, at least in California concealment of a material facts constitutes fraud in certain circumstances.

The US government did not tell the American people the truth about Soviet brutality in Poland. I think that hiding that truth amounted to a huge lie. How can we claim to have a government "of the people," when that government lies to the people or conceals important facts from the people. Government "by the people" and "of the people" can only exist when the people are fully informed of the facts.

What we have is a fraud, a government that rules by lies, that gains what appears to be majority support by withholding material information from the electorate.

This was particularly true of the Bush administration in the build-up to the Iraq War. Now, the Bush administration may have had legitimate reasons for wanting to invade Iraq, but if they did not know that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, it is only because they did not want to know it. The United Nations inspection team reported that there were no such weapons, and judging from the movements of our troops as they entered Iraq after the bombings, our government knew full well that Iraq had no such weapons.

A government that truly represents the people and is of the people does not lie to the people -- not even by omission.

Let's face it. Ours is a government of the oligarchy, by the oligarchy and for the oligarchy. And the oligarchy lies to us. Most of the ridiculous information that passed as "secrets" in the files Manning should not have been classified as secret. In fact, no one would have paid much attention to most of it had it not been labelled "secret." The whole business is very strange to my mind.

That's not Manning's leak. That's a completely different case, completely different leak at about the same time, as I remember, and it seems like common sense that no one at a military facility is going to have access to State Department correspondence in completely different countries.

I will point out that some other leaks at the same time shook some very corrupt, despotic governments. We seem inoculated against the outrage we should be feeling about ours.

It's the same case.

"it seems like common sense that no one at a military facility is going to have access to State Department correspondence in completely different countries"?

He had access to a computer, that had access to another computer...etc. Networks allow for all kinds of global connectivity.

Finding the balance is not easy.

The idea, and it's a good one, is that by limiting access to classified information to ONLY the people who need it for their work, you minimized the amount of damage someone like James Hall III (who was convicted of spying for East Germany) or Jonathan Pollard (who was convicted of spying for Israel) could inflict on the national interest.

Unfortunately, we had a "president" who was more interested in vacationing and acting like a First Lady with a penis than he was in keeping this country safe, and not even telling him the worst terrorist in the world was about to attack the United States could catch his attention. So, in order that guys who make $20,000 a year could do the president's job for him, he had a system called the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRnet) set up, every organization in the federal government that generates classified information puts theirs on SIPRnet, and now any person with at least a SECRET security clearance can do exactly what Bradley Manning allegedly did.

Just to prompt the government back into compartmentalizing data. Manning did a good thing.

Who said anything about war crimes and where is it written that for Manning's actions to be considered in the public interest that the information revealed needed to rise to that level?

is just the kind of garbage gossip you hear on the streets in the countries that the secrets concern, was secret in the first place.

I think it deserved the classification of confidential as in the old magazine that rehashed Hollywood gossip and sensational "facts," but at least the Wikileak articles I saw did not concern contemporary troop movements, strengths, or any information of strategic value.

I don't think there was even much about the economies or climates of the countries at issue. I don't recall there being anything about planned troop movements or new military equipment or anything that had real strategic value.

So why was something that had already happened in Iraq or Afghanistan a secret? The people in Iraq and Afghanistan knew that it happened. The only reason we didn't know was because OUR OWN GOVERNMENT didn't want us to know.

Am I missing something?

I am uncomfortable with the fact that a person would betray a secret, but I am also uncomfortable about the kinds of information that our government considers secret in the first place. If many people already know something, then it isn't a secret even if the American people don't generally know it.

The case at hand is about Manning disclosing information that was classified, not whether or not it should have been classified in the first place. That might make an interesting defense case, but I don't know that I would personally want to wager freedom for the rest of my life on it.

our money and time on keeping gossip secret. It's ridiculous. I don't know what Manning really did or did not do, but after the way he has been treated, I would be surprised if he is not intimidated into admitting that he ate the Eiffel Tower for lunch yesterday.

I don't know Manning. I don't like the idea that someone discloses a secret. It is breaking a trust, and we all try not to do that. But I don't understand why so much of this was considered secret in the first place. What a bunch of self-important bureaucratic nonsense.

they override what the military tells you

protection from prosecution.

Too lazy or too stupid, I guess.

and crimes against humanity.

Otherwise, he was merely obeying his oath to uphold the US Constitution and the Geneva Conventions.

If you're referring to the recent targeting of civilians in Pakistan,

(According to the statistics compiled by Pakistani authorities, the Afghanistan-based US drones killed 708 people in 44 predator attacks targeting the tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009. )
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16758

or the recent assasination of American citizens,

(According to the report, at one point analysts explicitly called Smith and Rast “friendlies,” only moments later to redact the statement. Shortly thereafter they wrote that they were “unable to discern who personnel were,” though an airstrike was carried out anyway.)
http://rt.com/usa/news/drone-american-military-report-057/

then you're referring to the White House of President Barak Obama.

and his whistle blowing is part of an effort to open our sleepy eyes to the true horrors that are committed in our name with our tax money. He has been treated terribly such as more than seven months of solitary (read torture) and then had to sleep and then stand at attention for a long time every morning with absolutely no clothes. This barbaric treatment has been done in our name. Shame on all those, including our President, who are responsible for this horrible handling of one who shone light on the TRUTH.

Manning (assuming he is guilty) was certainly educated about the consequences for divulging classified information.

As for the conditions of his confinement, they are in dispute at least.

To equate solitary confinement to torture, because a person "had to sleep and then stand at attention for a long time every morning"? Or the fact that a person who expressed a desire to kill himself was placed on suicide watch and therefore isn't left overnight in his cell with anything that he could hang himself with, like a sturdy pair of pants? That's almost as absurd as the people claiming he was being tortured because he was only allowed one blanket and one pillow.

Last edited Fri Feb 24, 2012, 01:59 PM - Edit history (1)

That is: I agree with your excellent reply.

Simply type "Solitary confinement + torture" into Google.

As for the suicide watch, the government itself has admitted the Brig Commander acted improperly, also easily found via Google.

and his whistle blowing is part of an effort to open our sleepy eyes to the true horrors that are committed in our name with our tax money. He has been treated terribly such as more than seven months of solitary (read torture) and then had to sleep and then stand at attention for a long time every morning with absolutely no clothes. This barbaric treatment has been done in our name. Shame on all those, including our President, who are responsible for this horrible handling of one who shone light on the TRUTH.

The crimes he exposed are legion, the crimes and the brutish modus operandi he exposed have went unpunished. The price of these crimes for the US, its barbarous empire, sickenly cloaked in claims of false righteousness, and finally for those who curse Manning to the pit for exposing these butcheries is the loss of all legitimate claims to morality now and throughout the coming sweep of the centuries.

A lot of this "secrecy" is nonsense to cover up propaganda program, to cover up a gross mistake in judgment, or simply to prevent a brutal dictator who may be useful to the US at the given moment from being embarrassed. It doesn't serve the long term interests of United States very well and serves the people the world at large, especially nations like Iraq and Tunisia, very poorly.

The goal of spreading democracy in the Middle East is laudable and it would be nice if the US acted on it instead of using it as a rouse to get popular support for wars aimed at enriching corporate coffers. Specialist Manning (I'll unilaterally give him back the rank my government took away from him) and Mr. Assange did more to democratize the Middle East than invading Iraq or supporting a motly crew of corrupt dictators ever did.

Manning will be shanghai'd into prison for an indefinite amount of time--probably life. Look at what happened to murderers at Haditha-- N-O-T-H-I-N-G. What does that tell you?

He exposed literal, dictionary-definition conspiracies of psychopaths in our government, in more than one instance (not that it matters to us, there are hundreds of them, and there will continue to be until most of the appointees from Bush I, Reagan, and Bush II eras are dead or retired). He'll be a hero for centuries to whatever sane world survives.

it doesn't really matter a flying fuck what Americans think about it right now except to govern how cruel we're going to be to him.

would it not have to prove that U.S. or allied forces actually suffered as a direct result of the information he divulged?

Or does it really mean he caused great embarrassment to the U.S? Locking someone up for life is a very heavy penalty for embarrassment.

This is going to be one tough case to prove!

Prosecutor: "We are sure he did it, your honor."
Judge: "That's good enough for me. Guilty on all counts!"

He was doing it *for* transparency *for* revealing corruption. That automatically destroys the sedition part of the argument. Espionage then, would require witnesses showing collusion with Manning. There is one witness whose testimony has been radicated. We have to see how that works out.

If he was doing it for his country, and to expose corruption, he should have followed the MWPA of 1988. Instead, he chose to take the easy way out and spent his January 2010 leave in the US, obtaining software to be loaded onto the DOD websites. ***

Ultimately, why he did it is irrelevant to the actual charge--nor does it provide an affirmative defense.

Something he writes, four months after the crime, after he is facing separation from the Army isn't credible...it's justification for something he knows is wrong. At least, that's what the prosecution will say. And they will be believed.



***That's conspiracy. That has nothing to do with the testimony of the redacted witness...but everything to do with the grand jury sitting in VA. It is a crime in and of itself, regardless of what he actually leaked.

Al Qaeda has helpfully disseminated recruitment video referencing the cables, even showing printouts from Wikileaks. Those videos were shown in court during the article 32.

Manning can't refute that the stuff got into the hands of the enemy. So his defense is trying to claim that what got into the hands of the enemy was no big deal. This is not an affirmative defense to the charge.

His defense seems to be in shambles. Besides what I think is a rather scurrilous anti-gay defense presented at the Article 32 hearing, his lawyer made the claim that Manning has waited too long for trial. Then Coombs filed 6 more motions. Coonbs also got dinged in court because he used unsecured email to send classified documents...so the prosecution is asking for restrictions on what he can share with others, and how he can share it.

Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nüremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal, 1950.

Principle I

Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment.


Principle II

The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law.


Principle III

The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible Government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.


Principle IV

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.


Principle V

Any person charged with a crime under international law has the right to a fair trial on the facts and law.


Principle VI

The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

(a) Crimes against peace:
(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

(b) War crimes:
Violations of the laws or customs of war include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave-labour or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war, of persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

(c) Crimes against humanity:
Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhuman acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connexion with any crime against peace or any war crime.


Principle VII

Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.

accountable.