The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention

You continue to assert that his disclosure is causing "extra suffering and death". Your entire premise is based on this assertion. So, with all due respect, I'm asking you to fucking prove it. For months, nobody from the Press to the DoD to the White House has been able to demonstrate a single harm caused by these releases, but perhaps you have some information we haven't seen yet.

Are you claiming that the film was propaganda because we were shown that there were children killed? Or because we were told that those children were not given access to top quality medical care after they ended up accidental casualties?

If it's propaganda to include such information, then it's surely propaganda to omit it, which is what the US did by classifying it.

As for the leaked information putting lives at risk, Wikileaks offered to let the US Government redact any information it saw fit to. This offer was refused.

It seems odd that a government that negotiates with thugs, warlords, torturers, criminals, etc., all over the world, and let that one guy flee with $42M in US cash, will ceremoniously refuse to "negotiate" in a way that would have removed any chance that the leaks would have caused ANY harm whatsoever.

This is at best hypocritical and at worst stupid. I should be honest it irritates me to hear anyone say "we don't negotiate with terrorists" because so much of what the US does is identical to terrorism -- dropping bombs from very high altitudes into the middle of civilian areas, etc.

The realization I've made after reading the leaks is that the US is a propaganda state every bit as much as North Korea. The only thing we have in our favor is a far more favorable mix of natural resources, etc, so we simply had to deal with $5/gallon gas instead of being called upon to make tea out of pine needles by our illustrious leader.

There's an easy way to avoid ambushes: Send the troops home. The only rationale for staying is to essentially convert the territories into the 51st and 52nd US states. Already we've tolerated ethnic cleansing, etc., and things are far worse under US rule than they were under Saddam or the Taliban. We need to be honest with ourselves about this and decide if we really want two more states at the expense of so many indigenous lives. We should not be pretending that we can wage sterile war with smart bombs and that we're fighting against evil. We're simply taking valuable land. It's neither sterile or smart.

On balance the US has caused far more suffering in the past decade than the Taliban, and perhaps the leaks will allow the public to realize what is going on and call for it to stop. So maybe you're right, maybe Manning would emerge a folk hero, reveal one or two more key tidbits, and run for office himself from behind bars.

My favorite line from Sun Tzu is where he describes how a strong nation has children playing along its borders and a weak nation has soldiers lined up. Ever since George W. Bush took office we've been acting like a weak nation.

Sure the leaks were embarrassing. So fix the major security holes in military IT systems, apologize to the allies that were embarrassed, and move on.

I think there are generally two perspectives on US intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan:

The idealist perspective is that we invaded to thwart evil and to decrease the chances of domestic terrorism in the US.

The realist perspective is that wars are not about good and evil but about land and resources, and that the rest of the rhetoric is just a veneer added to help sell the war.

Iraq is the most valuable piece of land in the middle east. Afghanistan is also tremendously valuable. Perhaps my mention of them being the 51st and 52nd US states was hyperbole, but clearly the US wants to install client regimes in both places.

What are the characteristics of a client regime? Democracy is not usually valued all that much (hence our removal of democratically elected leaders around the world), thuggery is tolerated (hence the bribing of Afghan warlords, etc.) and all that is expected is that the state do the US's bidding in exchange for military protection and often aid.

In terms of military strategy, all this makes sense. You want to use soft power... better to bribe some warlords than to risk American lives, etc. Better to install a client regime that will prevent a possible enemy from consolidating power, etc.

The issue I have with this is that most people fail to see this as the brutal power projection of a massive empire.

In my opinion, we can't have it both ways... we can't be a pluralistic, free society and also cause so much suffering via our imperial "churn".

If you read the essay that Condi wrote in Foreign Affairs a few years ago in which she described in detail the "Bush Doctrine", you'll notice that she musters her significant academic training in an attempt to merge the notion of free society values with imperial power projection.

In my view, any explanation boils down to saying "We're going to civilize those savages, even if we have to kill quite a few to do so".

At this point, the side-effects of past Imperial actions are nearly impossible to differentiate from organic events. What we do know is that Al Qaida was largely a consequence of US efforts to use soft power to kick the Soviets out of Afghanistan, that Saddam had received significant military aid from the US, and that the US overthrew democratically elected regimes in Iran.

None of it was done for any abstract value such as freedom, but simply to control a very valuable area and attempt to create client regimes there (or prevent others from doing so), since such machinations are cheaper than US soldiers' lives and represent the use of "economy of force" compared to all-out war/conquest.