After years of abuse in confinement from denying him a charge to denying him counsel, Pfc. Bradley Manning finally had a trial on the most serious charge against him: aiding the enemy. He was convicted on lesser charges. The verdict should again focus attention on the mistreatment of Manning by the Obama Administration for leaking classified reports and diplomatic cables. Many of these documents showed that the U.S. government was lying to the public and to its allies.
Manning previously pleaded guilty to 10 of 22 counts of lesser charges in giving the documents to Wikileaks. He could still face a long sentence and the Obama Administration has clearly worked to make an example of him after he embarrassed the government with both the public and allies.
The documented abuse of Manning by the Obama Administration while in custody will result in a four-month credit toward his sentencing. Yet there has been virtually no demand for the punishment of those responsible for the abuse.
The acquittal is a victory for military justice. There was never any evidence of an intent to aid the enemy and the overcharging of the case was indicative of the excessive response of the Administration — the same pattern shown with Snowden and Assange. Of course, those false or controversial communications in these documents have not been the focus of coverage by the media.
The verdict is also a vindication for the defense in taking a plea on the earlier charges to focus on the most serious charge.
Source: Politico
AY: Thanks for the articles.
Michael: And thanks for the Wiki reference. You really impressed me with your vast knowledge of Googling sh*t up.
mespo: Some lies are necessary as every adult knows.
No, they aren’t. Lies are for cowards that are afraid for people to know the truth, or told to wrong-doers in order to catch them or prevent them from doing wrong.
Please, regale us with some lies you think every adult knows are necessary lies, where simple silence won’t suffice.
“He was a PFC! He was, by definition, completely inexperienced.” — Juliet Lester Neary
Shows how much you know about the definition of “experienced” in the United States Army. From Wikipedia:
To simplify things for you, “completely inexperienced” would refer to an E-1 enlistee who has yet to complete his first day of basic training. “Six months of military experience” would refer to an E-2 who has completed both basic and advanced infantry training (AIT). “A year or more of military experience” would refer to an E-3, or Private First Class.”
Anything else you want to share with us concerning your own extensive knowledge of — and experience serving in — the United States military? For my money, any PFC who can survive a year of solitary, degrading, and brutal confinement in a marine corps brig and still emerge with a smile on his face and an unbroken spirit more than deserves the accolade of “hero.” Think Cool Hand Luke here.
History will remember the name of PFC Bradley Manning long after it has forgotten — if it ever knew in the first place — the names of the sorry excuse for a “judge” and “the prosecution” in this kangaroo-court “case.”
Michael: A year barely gets one through basic and AIT. You have no idea what you’re talking about, so kindly STFU with your insults. I was a sergeant/E-5, holding an E-7 position in a base S-2. I worked directly for the base commander. I know what I’m talking about. You don’t. Bugger off.
Mespo,
I agree with you that I too believe in heroes. All of the service men and women who have put their backsides on the line deserve our respect and thanks.
Oky1,
Not to quibble, but the government wasn’t hijacked by the corporations, they became partners with them…for a price.
mespo727272 1, July 31, 2013 at 3:47 pm
… Some lies are necessary as every adult knows.
===========================
Au contraire.
You confuse “adult” with incompetence.
“I must lie to spread the truth.”
It is that same hangup you keep evangelizing (“I think about heroes every time I see some peach fuzz faced kid”).
That is human sacrifice you are in a romantic trance over.
Which is done because you worship senseless authoritarian power that is as blind as a runaway Terminator.
Lies are the germs of dementia.
If you lie you not only have it, you spread it.
The heroes are the ones who are trying to get over the senseless human sacrifice.
Daniel Ellsberg: ‘I’m sure that President Obama would have sought a life sentence in my case’
By Timothy B. Lee, Published: June 5
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/05/daniel-ellsberg-im-sure-that-president-obama-would-have-sought-a-life-sentence-in-my-case/
Excerpts:
Timothy B. Lee: Why are you publicly supporting Bradley Manning?
Daniel Ellsberg: There are two reasons. One is to educate the public on the wars that he was exposing and the information that he put out. He has said his goal was to help the public make informed decisions. We’re grateful for that, and we’re trying to extend that word and bring that about.
Also, I and a lot of other people feel that we need more whistleblowers, and that to allow the government simply to stigmatize them without opposition does not encourage that. I think we’ve got to convey to people appreciation for the information that we do get, the idea that someone can make a difference.
In a military trial there isn’t a whole lot of possible influence, but the general atmosphere in the public is bound to make some influence on the judge. [We want the judge to] stop and think that there were some benefits [to Manning’s actions].
…
Specifically, they’re charging Bradley with the video. [A video of a 2007 helicopter strike in Baghdad released by WikiLeaks under the title “Collateral Murder.”] That was not in fact classified. But whether it was or not, it was wrongly withheld from Reuters who twice made Freedom of Information Act requests knowing it existed. David Finkel at The Washington Post quoted from the video. Bradley Manning was aware that Reuters had made that request and had been denied and that The Washington Post had access to the video and he believed that they had the video. I don’t think it’s ever been established whether the Washington Post reporter had the video.
That video depicts a war crime, an unarmed, injured civilian being deliberately killed. A squad was going to be in the area in minutes. They also shot at people who were trying to help the victims, including a father and two children.
Manning sees this, knows it’s a crime, knows the evidence has been refused to Reuters. He knows there’s no way for the American public to see that except to put it out. By any standard that’s what he should have done. For them to charge him with that shows an outrageous sensibility. Going after the man who exposes the war crime instead of any of the ones who actually did it, none of whom were indicted or investigated.
TL: I think some people have the impression that recent leaks have posed a greater threat to national security, and that the government’s prosecutions were therefore more justified, than what you did in the early 1970s. Do you think that’s true?
DE: There’s a very general impression that Bradley Manning simply dumped out everything that he had access to without any discrimination, and that’s very misleading or mistaken on several counts. He was in a facility that dealt mainly in information higher than top secret in classification. He put out nothing that was higher than secret. [Information he published] was available to hundreds of thousands of people. He had access to material that was much higher than top secret, much more sensitive. He chose not to put any of that out. He explained that in his statement to the court. He said what he put out was no more than embarrassing to the government.
There was more meat in the material [that Manning released] than I as a Pentagon official would have expected to find in material that was only [classified as] secret. There was information about torture and deaths of civilians. Apparently that is so routine in these current wars that it wasn’t regarded as sensitive.
So far the Pentagon has not been able to point to a single example of information that led to harm to an American. If they had, I think we’d have seen pictures of victims on the cover of Time magazine.
“….we’ll just pat them on their little heads and send them on their merry way.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/12/bradley-manning-cruel-inhuman-treatment-un
“Bradley Manning’s treatment was cruel and inhuman, UN torture chief rules
UN special rapporteur on torture’s findings likely to reignite criticism of US government’s treatment of WikiLeaks suspect”
… and he’s facing the rest of his life in prison.
Sure. Just a pat on his head and sent on his merry way.
Anyway, the take-away from the Glaser piece:
“The real task is for Americans to get to the point where the country — and its government — is ruled by law, and not by men.”
mespo727272 1, July 31, 2013 at 3:50 pm
Dredd:
Whether you care to admit it or not many wars decide things. WW2 decided the fate of Nazi-ism. The Civil War decided slavery in this country. The Cold War decided the fate of Communism.
But of course, no one was talking about romantic war, merely the sacrifice we ask our young to make in service to our freedom.
===========================
Your sentiments are recent.
I quoted those who wrote the constitution … whose words now ring so mysteriously true.
Must be common sense of some sort.
You are persuaded by those that overthrew it then claimed to have destroyed it in order to save it.
Their fundamental “romantic wisdom” is to destroy in order to save.
Which goes back to human sacrifice.
A dementia which has brought down every empire that fell into that sh*t hole of phoniness (Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala – 2). Those innocents whom you murder thank you for saving them is the core spirituality of that romantic heroism.
Dredd:
Whether you care to admit it or not many wars decide things. WW2 decided the fate of Nazi-ism. The Civil War decided slavery in this country. The Cold War decided the fate of Communism.
But of course, no one was talking about romantic war, merely the sacrifice we ask our young to make in service to our freedom.
Tony C:
Like people, governments lie all the time. It’s the reason for the lie that matters not the act itself. Some lies are necessary as every adult knows.
mespo727272 1, July 31, 2013 at 3:20 pm
…
Call me a romantic.
=============================
More like an enabler of the greatest danger to our freedom:
(The Greatest Source Of Power Toxins?, quoting “The Father of the Constitution“). But indeed a romantic in the sense that they worshiped Mithras like our military does (The Virgin MOMCOM – 6) by killing millions of innocents, and by spying on hundreds of millions of innocent Americans.
“It is forbidden to kill therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” -Voltaire
“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” – James Madison
“Experience has shown that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” – Thomas Jefferson
Yeah, real romantic stuff.
The link to John Glaser’s piece:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-glaser/bradley-manning-revealed-_b_3678734.html
Bradley Manning Revealed Crimes Far Worse Than the Ones He Supposedly Committed
by John Glaser, Editor at Antiwar.com
07/30/13
WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning has been acquitted of the most serious charge against him, that of aiding the enemy. But the 20-something other charges, including espionage, have stuck and could land him a sentence of more than 100 years in prison.
In the media world, even national security hawks like The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake concede that Manning’s leaks had “a lot of public benefit.” But very few have argued Manning should go free.
Did Manning break the law? According to the letter, yes he did. But since when did we presume to hold people in government accountable to the law?
The Bush administration lied to the American people in order to justify the war crime of attacking Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. That crime qualified, in the words of the Nuremberg Tribunal, as “the supreme international crime differing only from other crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Trillions of dollars and the death and suffering of millions of people were the consequences of that crime.
The Bush gang also secretly ordered warrantless surveillance of Americans’ domestic communications without involving the courts, a blatant violation of both constitutional and statutory law. And don’t forget the setting up of a worldwide torture regime that directly violated longstanding international law as well as domestic law, specifically a Convention against torture, passed by Congress and signed by Ronald Reagan, which specifies that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever… may be invoked as a justification of torture.”
Yet, nobody but the most marginal voices in our politics ever dared to suggest the Bush administration should be prosecuted according to the letter of the law.
Many of these types of crimes have extended into the Obama era as well. The Obama administration’s penchant for secret legal interpretations of when the Bill of Rights applies and when it doesn’t conflicts with basic principles of the rule of law.
James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, recently committed perjury when he lied to Congress about whether the National Security Agency collects information on American citizens, a federal crime as it turns out. He issued an apology, but otherwise faces no consequences.
In the U.S., there are crimes the government approves of and those it doesn’t. Contrast Bradley Manning’s punishment, for example, with that of the commander in charge of the torture at Abu Ghraib. Manning was subjected to abusive detention and faces more than a hundred years in prison. Col. Thomas M. Pappas, who oversaw the brutal torment of hundreds of detainees got an $8,000 fine.
Bradley Manning’s leaks revealed crimes far worse than the ones he has supposedly committed. The Collateral Murder video shows the sickening slaughter of a group of people in Iraq, including journalists and rescuers.
One State Department cable revealed to the world for the first time that U.S. special operations forces raided a house in Iraq in 2006 and summarily executed one man, four women, two children, and three infants — all shot in the head. Although Phillip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, brought the incident to the attention of then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Bush administration failed to respond.
Manning’s leaks also revealed the fact that the Obama administration colluded with the Yemeni dictatorship of Ali Abdullah Saleh to execute a secret war without the consent of Congress and systematically lie about it. Yet Manning, who blew the whistle on this criminality, is the only one facing legal prosecution.
The lopsided nature of our legal system is well-known to any close observer of American politics. The law is for the powerful to defy with impunity, and for the weak to be punished with.
History, at least, will look very kindly on the actions of Bradley Manning and harshly on the crimes of the overlords he challenged. The real task is for Americans to get to the point where the country — and its government — is ruled by law, and not by men.
mespo: It didn’t have to be leaked as it adds nothing to the dialog about government cover-ups.
Funny stuff, considering it is a leak of a government lie and cover-up. In particular, the Swedish government’s lie about their publicly claimed non-alignment; and the US Government’s lies in support of that stance.
How did that leak do anything but embarrass Sweden and the USA? It did not endanger any troops or a military mission. If in the future some countries refuse to betray their citizens in order to cooperate with us: Good. The USA has no business having an “interest” in corrupting or coercing the governments of other peaceful countries by either threats or bribery.
As for the Chinese dissidents, that would indeed be a problem, but those leaks did not endanger any US soldiers or reveal any military missions. The leak of those names is a betrayal of Chinese trust, but it did not endanger any Americans.
Manning pled guilty to relatively minor charges as a legal strategy. And clearly Manning was guilty of some actions that are, in the literal sense, against the law (whether they should be crimes or not.)
That does not mean Manning was not a hero, we should consider Manning a hero because he acted selflessly and at great risk to himself (and later came to harm) in order to reveal the truth to the world and hopefully cause reform.
To the extent he harmed others by that information, my hope would be that the benefits of the truth will exceed the costs of the truth; but whether that is true or not I always think, as a matter of principle, that it is better for us to know the truth than to be defrauded or deluded.
Manning is suffering because he delivered us from delusion and exposed the truth, and even if that has costs or could have been better done, that is why we should consider Manning a hero.
Oky1:
“Some like myself completely reject what’s implied by the word Hero.
I don’t believe in heroes”
*****************
I do. I just think we use the word too often. I think about heroes every time I see some peach fuzz faced kid who looks a lot like one of my own dressed in fatigues flying off to some godforsaken place because we ask him to put his life on the line for us.
Call me a romantic.
Mespo/Mark: Amen.
Anonymously Posted: Cool. So long as criminals snitch on someone who has done worse, we’ll just pat them on their little heads and send them on their merry way.
mespo,
Some like myself completely reject what’s implied by the word Hero.
I don’t believe in heroes.
There are people that for what reason are able to rise above themselves & shine.
Sometimes people attempt to do what’s right & they screw it up & pay a price.
And to that point I don’t think anyone can argue that this govt hasn’t be hijacked by globalist banking trash billionaires & that this govt is currently dysfunctional & it’s up to the people, inside & outside govt to push however they can to restore our Republic.
mespo727272 1, July 31, 2013 at 2:33 pm
… According to ABC News …
=========================
Nuff said.
Those presstitutes always give you your money’s worth.
Juliet Lester Neary 1, July 31, 2013 at 2:39 pm
He was a PFC! He was, by definition, completely inexperienced. He hacked into information he didn’t otherwise have. I’d bet every dollar I’ve ever made, and ever will make, that he didn’t read one-fifth of what he released.
Scared, confused kid. NOT a hero.
============================
Neary a clue …
[The military] was a PFC [public freakin catastrophe]! [They were], by definition, completely inexperienced [in diplomatic decency]. [The military NSA] hacked into information [they] didn’t otherwise have. I’d bet every dollar I’ve ever made, and ever will make, that [they] didn’t read one-fifth of what he released.
Scared, confused [military NSA]. NOT a hero.
On our atomic bomb discussion: While the Japanese were strategically defeated before Hiroshima they were not tactically defeated and showed every willingness to continue to kill Americans by the thousands. The kamikaze raids well into 1945 prove that. The bomb drop was at least debatable as a way to protect American lives from zealots willing to lose their own to defeat us.
In the US Civil War, Southern forces were strategically defeated at Gettysburg on July 1-3, 1863 and at Vicksburg on July 4, 1863 and any hope of capturing Washington was lost by the latter day. However the South continued to wage war until 1865 to the tune of thousands lost on both sides at bloody battles like Chickamauga, Spotsylvania Courthouse, The Wilderness, and Petersburg.