Bradley Manning Charged With 22 New Counts, Including Capital Offense | Hacker News Reader

Bradley Manning Charged With 22 New Counts, Including Capital Offense

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42 pointsssclafani47 comments

From http://change.gov/agenda/ethics_agenda/

"Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process."

What he did is not even close to whistle blowing and you know it.

“EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”

http://www.ellsberg.net/archive/public-accuracy-press-releas...

Whistleblowing would be if the things he was leaking about were illegal activities that need to be stopped. You could sort of make an argument about war crimes for some of the leaks but it'd be a huge stretch to call it whistleblowing when he dumps a bunch of mostly-innocent cables en masse. And I love wikileaks and what they're doing. But if you're the military here, you have to throw the book at the guy.

What does this have to do with what Manning (allegedly) did?

Did you even read the link?

Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, having watched Iraqi police abuses, and having read of similar and worse incidents in official messages, reportedly concluded, “I was actively involved in something that I was completely against.” Rather than simply go with the flow, Manning wrote: “I want people to see the truth … because without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public,” adding that he hoped to provoke worldwide discussion, debates, and reform.

@anthonyb: no, I did not read the link. I assumed that the relevant part was the quote, and the link was just a citation to the source.

So go read it already.

It means something thast Ellsburg supports Manning's actions, but it doesn't decide the question of whether he's a whistleblower (I don't think he remotely is either).

Unfortunately, he's being subjected to a military justice process with a different set of rules which is largely biased or inherently unfair against people the military doesn't like.

You give up many of your civilian rights when joining the military and agree to be bound by the UCMJ, not civilian court. How can the UCMJ be biased against people the military doesn't like if it only applies to the military?

I agree his detention is horrific, but he's bound by rules he agreed to, and rules which are probably not (I assume, and in general) that biased or "inherently unfair" when viewed from the perspective of the military--which is the perspective to which they solely apply.

See DADT for how the military can easily be biased against people it doesn't like while only applying to the military...

Well, there is the matter of discretion. The collateral murder video put a lot of egg on a lot of people's faces and I bet some of those people were the one who declared him a "suicide risk" and put him in indefinite solitary.

that always seemed weird to me.

The constitution guarantees inalienable rights, yet apparently the government thinks that you can sign your rights away

Good point. Plus there is that bit about people not being able to give up those rights, even if they want to.

I didn't say stuff along the lines of signing the rights away, or the like. I said the military justice system is designed that the military prosecutors have an inherent unfair advantage in how they decide and control the process of justice. eg indefinite detention under the guise 'building case', suicide call checks every 5 minutes under 'suicide watch', loss of time perception under 'terrorists use watches' etc.

I don't see why the military, a well-armed arm of the USA government to carry out extreme activities, can't have a neutral court that takes reasonable care of their own accused soldiers and has fair due process.

What would you consider to be fair for someone who (allegedly) copied a huge number of documents, which he KNEW contained information that would get hundreds of innocent people killed if it were ever released without redaction, and released it to third party, which he had good reason to know would in turn release the documents to the press?

Due to Manning, at least six outside organizations have copies of the documents, without redaction, including one newspaper outside the group that Wikileaks distributed them to for help with the redacting. This shows that Wikileaks is unable to control distribution of the full documents.

A hundred thousand civilians have died in Iraq already, and I've yet to hear of anyone who's died as a direct result of the leaks.

So, because a hundred thousand civilians have died in Iraq, your logic is that a few more would be a rounding error and thus an acceptable cost for getting the documents out? I don't agree with that logic.

Thanks for putting words in my mouth.

No, my logic is that the current status quo in Iraq is secrecy, and it makes it much easier for human rights abuses or slack rules of engagement to be swept under the rug. At least some proportion of those deaths would have been prevented if there was greater oversight from the general public, both American and overseas.

None of that is responsive to the original comment you tried to rebut. I don't support the Iraq war either, but that doesn't mean I share your opinion about Manning.

Ok, I'll spell it out for you. The pretext for going to war in Iraq was that Saddam had WMDs - a pretext that was later found to be extremely flimsy. If we (ie. the public) had had access to unfiltered information, not just what the US/UK goverments wanted us to have, would we have gone to war? I doubt it.

Hence you need to balance the cost of releasing the information (maybe a few hundred deaths, but that's yet to be demonstrated) vs. the cost of being led around by whoever's in power (currently >100,000 civilian deaths, and a borderline civil war in Iraq).

The leaks include names, addresses, and even GPS coordinates for the homes of people who have cooperated with the Afghan government or the US. They also contains names and addresses of people who the US thought might be in danger and so needed to keep an eye on, because those people did such heinous crimes as teaching girls.

In the past, when the Taliban has found out the identities of such people they have often killed them, and their families.

Do you have some reason to believe that Taliban policy is only to kill such people when they find out about them themselves, and so if the unedited documents became public the Taliban would NOT go after the people named in them?

There's a reason (besides trying to milk this for all the publicity they can get) that Wikileaks doesn't just make all the documents available as is. They know that without redaction, they will get innocent people killed. That's why they are redacting them (with the help of the several newspapers they gave copies to).

Good points, but what makes you think the Taliban aren't going after these people already? Or that the information isn't already accessible to them - the Afghan government is incredibly corrupt, and I find it hard to believe that anything that they know would be kept secret.

Ditto for Iraq - the US went in woefully underprepared, and even today you have roving militants gunning each other down. If there were more transparency and more information about what was happening at the time, you'd have avoided (or at least mitigated) situations like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and had less violence.

The UCMJ is different from civilian court, but it's worth pointing out that the military very much is bound by a civilian court, in that decisions of the military appeals court can be overturned by SCOTUS.

As I said in another comment, nearly every veteran I've discussed the matter with would rather be prosecuted under the UCMJ than the civilian justice system.

The process is fair. It's also a rather simple matter of fact that what Bradley Manning did is, in fact, illegal. You might think it should be legal to leak classified information, but in that case your complaint isn't with the justice system at all, it's with the laws it is enforcing.

Per this article http://news.scotsman.com/world/Tunisia-Uprising-called-first... these leaked documents were an impetus that led to the fall of Tunisia's monarchy. Which then has brought on a domino effect in the Middle East; Egypt, Libya, Yemen, etc...

Depending on the long term out-come of the change in the Middle East(for the better) this guy's actions might not seem so bad in ten years?

The military justice system in USA is a human rights joke: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_Guant...

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Bradley_Manni...

There's a major, important distinction between the kangaroo "military tribunals" Bush tried to set up for Gitmo detainees and the UCMJ. Nearly every veteran I've discussed the matter with would rather be prosecuted under the UCMJ than the civilian justice system.

There have been some (recently a lot of) problems, but speaking in general terms, the US courts-martial have been and are a model of military justice the world over. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courts-martial_in_the_United_St... The main trouble lately has been the use of military tribunals against civilians or "enemy combatants" instead of courts-martial or civilian courts. I'm all for calling out abuses, but I think it's a bit much to say the whole justice system is a joke.

True. However, justice systems tend to be absolutists. That's why confessions under duress aren't admission-able for example. To see a select few can abuse the due process when they can, means that the system needs improvement.

Plus, as you say, it's being used against civilians and enemy combatants.

It's impossible to feel sorry for this guy. How could you ever think this was a good idea?

So the USA is executing dissidents now?

He's not being charged with being a dissident, he's being charged with treason.

    The Army has filed 22 new counts against suspected 
    WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, among them a capital 
    offense for which the government said it would not seek 
    the death penalty.

That's the first sentence of the article.

Flagging this because too many people are downvoting people they politically disagree with, meaning this is going to become a worthless discussion.

Agreed.

Seems like anything with "Manning" in it here is a guaranteed flame war.

Nah, I'm downvoting people (like you) who aren't bothering to read people's posts properly.

I think the main problem is that the American media is ridiculously pro-military/anti-wikileaks, so it's hard to get unbiased information.

You've now twice accused me of improperly reading other people's posts. Yet your reply to my comment about the risks in the unedited documents showed that you certainly are not reading properly.

I read what you wrote - I just disagree with you.

I'm not exactly sure what punishment he should get, but it's definitely not the death penalty (or life in prison either, for that matter). You know who should get life in prison? Whoever wrote up SIPRNET's network security policies and whoever's responsible for implementing them.

If you could prove that there was obvious negligence (and incompetence) while designing and implementing the network then yeah some charges should be brought in my opinion. I believe (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that engineers are can be charged if a building they designed collapses due to bad design.

They'll generally get charged if they don't follow standard precautions eg. getting sign off on the design from a second, independent engineer.

Pretty sure SIPRNET IA policies were relaxed dramatically as a response to 9/11, when there was a strong belief that various agencies and groups restrictive data policies were hurting AT cooperation. Now, of course, I'm sure they've been tightened again. Kind of a damned if you do scenario.

I would think the people who designed the system would have had several layers of security as it relates to their database. I've only designed a few myself, but even I know all your users shouldn't have the same privileges. The more I read this story, the more I wonder why a private 1st class had full blown access to classified documents. It seems like security was an after thought, and now they're paying the price.

It's the same issue to, in addition to interdepartmental sharing the belief was that overly restricting information inside organizations could keep it out of the hands of the one analyst that would put "plot x" together.

Keep in mind Manning was an intelligence analyst, and the documents he distributed were of low classification levels.

I think the bigger issue was with allowing him to retain access to classified data while obviously disgruntled and having issues with his chain of command. His unit should have pulled his clearance (if it ever should have been granted) once it became clear he was going to be separated from the army for cause, etc.

I hope his (transgendered, or gay, or something) sexual identity doesn't color public perception of the end of DADT; there are plenty of non-heterosexual members of the military who are not security risks. However, if he was getting separated over some "transition" related issues, that information would be relevant to a security clearance review in his particular case.

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