Bradley Manning’s Statement
bradleymanning.org
bradleymanning.org
How far the US Government will sink before they realize that every time they do something like this they are hurting their own interests is anybody's guess. Be it drone attacks that kill children as collateral damage (Oh, but we apologized) or torture dressed up as self protection it hardly matters.
If you want to criticize the world then you need to set an example, not by taking out your rage on others but by wondering what it is that you are doing wrong and then correcting that.
Slowly but surely every 'own goal' is reducing the United States' importance on the world stage. And that's a real pity because we really do need an entity that is a little larger than most that can serve as a role model for the rest. As it is the role model seems to be that might makes right and that if you deny your problems and your mistakes that you can get away with it. The rules apply to everybody but you.
The treatment of Manning and eventual treatment of Assange will be our generation's Vietnam - an active demonstration of our government's willingness to lie to and abuse us, a touchstone for all who are seeking a reason not to cooperate.
It would certainly be nice if that was the case. However, it's much more likely the average American doesn't know (or care) about Manning, other than the occasional footnote on the 10 o'clock news, and in a year or two he will be forgotten.
Bradley Manning made an oath to serve as a faithful soldier and broke it. He received the same treatment any prisoner in this country does and I can find little wrong in what happened to him.
At Ruby Ridge, a man had his entire family shot to death by federal agents over a missed court date and an entrapment scheme, while at Waco, the federal government badgered a doomsday cult into killing themselves at the very least.
It's your prerogative whether you "find little wrong" with the way any person is treated, but the bit about his treatment being the same as any other prisoner is pretty willfully obtuse.
The judge in his trial has ruled that he was kept in prevention of suicide status far longer than was necessary, but they don't seem to have innovated any special procedures for Manning.
At the same time, it's not everyday that an intelligent soldier with mental issues and possible gender identity confusion on the most far-reaching modern case of deliberate information leakage comes into your brig. Manning's own lawyers admit that he joked about killing himself, and especially at first there was the real danger of being killed by one of the other prisoners. And the fallout of Manning being killed in prison would be extreme, to say the least.
Manning was not treated like a general prisoner, but at least part of that was because he wasn't just a random prisoner accused of a normal crime.
I'm not suggesting that this justifies anything, but we both live in NATO.
This is done by rewriting history. The idea that we have had wars about moral causes is 100% fals. The moral angle comes later once the victor gets the chance to tarnish his enemy forever in the history books.
Any of us would say ANYTHING facing that. Anything.
They are roasting him alive now, government has over 140 "witnesses" to put on the stand.
They are going to make an example out of him, it's going to be horrible.
Anyway, what I find disgusting about the whole 'Manning' case is that vetting procedures should have never ever allowed this man to get even close to sensitive material, let alone top-secret. Burning him at the stake is just a way to assign blame when in reality every person that ever evaluated Mannings psychological profile had been asleep at the switch. The guy needs help, not punishment. The fact that we as a society depend on the Bradley Mannings of this world to keep us on the straight and narrow is what is really frightening.
Based on the contents of what Manning's leaks, shouldn't we be a lot more worried about depending on a military and state department rife with corruption and immorality? If members of military and diplomatic corps took their oaths to the country and constitution seriously, there should be many more whistleblowers than Manning, given the apparent levels of routine misconduct in those organizations.
Absolutely, but that's not really the subject of the thread. I strongly believe that we could move forward quite a bit by taking corporate interests & cronyism out of the political equation.
> If members of military and diplomatic corps took their oaths to the country and constitution seriously, there should be many more whistleblowers than Manning, given the apparent levels of routine misconduct in those organizations.
Again, no disagreement there. Which is exactly the reason they're coming down like a ton of bricks on Manning, we really don't want to give any other whistleblowers the idea that they can get away with it.
The part where they are not paying attention is that by treating Manning in this way they've caused his case to become an example of how bad things really are, on top of that they're giving the signal that if you pass out secret documents in bulk the only thing you probably should do different compared to Manning is that you should not tell others.
It was the lowest clearance, btw.
No, I don't claim that.
> Or how come, you dismiss him as a fragile person?
Because, unlike you, I know his biography by heart.
> it was the lowest clearance by the way:
"Receiving a TS/SCI security clearance (Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information)."
see:
I would not go so far as to paint Manning as 'weak, gay, sexually uncertain', but I definitely would think twice when confronted with his history if I were to give him some clearance level (not that I'll ever be in a position to do so).
Manning strikes me as someone that has a pretty highly developed sense of what is right and what is wrong. US foreign policy is not just 'unethical', I think it transcends that several levels at least.
The main reason why the US Government is going after Manning is not because it distracts the attention from US foreign policy, but mostly because he made them look like fools.
to me, discussing and speculating his state of mind, his personality from a armchair just doesn' feel right. It might not even correlate with his actions. They count and were well intended, ethical, brave, helping and in a good democratic spirit. They were also foolish, off, dangerous and endangering. I am convinced that people with different psych.
I hope he will be treated like Daniel Elsberg.
That's a ridiculous mockery of anything they think should be a "secret" from US citizens.
First and foremost, they're just a background check. There are lots of janitors and painters that have Secret or Top Secret clearances so they can work in buildings that contain that kind of information. There are large swaths of people that work in factories with clearances that really couldn't tell you anything of value - but they have to pass a background check to get the job.
Then once you narrow it down to the people that have actual classified knowledge, they generally only know a sliver of a small area and that's it. "Need to know" matters a whole lot.
The people with wide ranging access to lots of different databases is very small. I would bet Bradley Manning is one of less than 50,000 or so people with that kind of access.
You'd lose that bet pretty quickly. He was one of those.
Classified material is kept from US citizens as a side-effect of it not being public. Believe it or not there are certain limited exceptions in practice to those classification requirements, since the exceptions don't translate to full public disclosure. E.g. a military spouse knowing the week to expect their spouse's return home, something which is normally classified from public disclosure until after it's already occurred.
> The fact that we as a society depend on the Bradley
> Mannings of this world to keep us on the straight and
> narrow is what is really frightening.
My guess is all of them.
However you may be surprised to hear that most (on the ground at least) are not actually going around playing Let's Clean our Bayonets With Civilian Guts everyday...
I would be interested in an answer to my original question then. We do still blame Bush for "bringing democracy to Iraq" after all, seems like fair's fair.
If Iraq had a true democracy they'd nationalize the oil fields and they'd renegotiate their terms with the Western oil companies from a position of strength rather than at gunpoint.
But we already know how that would end, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat
And all the good that came of that.
From Bush's speech: "A campaign on harsh terrain in a vast country could be longer and more difficult than some have predicted. And helping Iraqis achieve a united, stable, and free country will require our sustained commitment. Yet, whatever is required of us, we will carry out all the duties we have accepted." (emphasis mine, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/200...)
But either way, let's take it as true, the Bush White House was not exactly consistent with regarding to the reasoning for invading Iraq at any point.
However, bringing democracy to the countries affected by the Arab Spring wasn't always the stated goal either, no? At least for Libya, Syria, and Egypt the issue was the corruption of the then-current government. Although in all of those cases the end result appears to be on track for some kind of democratic state, it's not looking very promising in Egypt IMHO. And who knows where the ruins of Syria will end up?
> If Iraq had a true democracy they'd nationalize the oil fields
Well Big Oil was doing just fine before the U.S. invaded Iraq, and in general seem to do better when Islamists aren't blowing up their pipelines. So while I "rah rah bad corporations" too I'm not quite to the point where I'm willing to pin all geopolitical maneuvers on what's best for Exxon-Mobil.
You're exactly right that Iraq is potentially in a better position to force re-negotiation of oil contracts than Saddam's Iraq was; they could simply buy off the puppet. So maaaybe we should be careful about all the accusations "Blood for Oil" for Iraq in 2003, as the war made no sense at all from the perspective of Western oil companies.
Even now I have no clue as to why Bush actually invaded Iraq but I don't think it was oil. Even if it was somehow much easier for American companies to get access to Iraq's oil after a protracted occupation, it wouldn't be worth the capital (let alone human) cost overall even for all the oil in Iraq. Even if Bush didn't know that, all his oil friends that he was buddy-buddy with could easily tell him.
Turkey is about the best example in the region that has managed to deal relatively well with internal strife and yet to maintain some sense of progress. Now if only my country and the Germans could let go of their fears and integrate Turkey into the EU then we can lay the spectre of Turkey going the total opposite way to bed. And with each day the EU dilly-dallies that chance increases.
Even though some would argue the Turkey of 15 years ago was ahead of the one that's there today, I'd hope the Egyptians might take a leaf or two out of Turkeys book. I hope the country will not fall apart or into further disarray. Not all change is for the better, I think that from the perspective of the Egyptians trading Mubarak for a solution like the Turks have would be a big plus, some of the other alternatives not so much...
Time will tell.
I would not consider the transcript complimentary, it does not portray a high-minded, moral crusader. It portrays Manning, the depressed, confused, trans-gendered person, acting out against the Military Establishment.
[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/manning-lamo-logs/
We tend to project our insecurities more when we're having casual conversation with people we consider friends.
We tend to project our ideals more when we're having serious philosophic debate, defending our character, or, you know, being charged with war crimes.
I have a hard time believing the flagrant and wanton release of material was and is not suicide by Court Martial.
He's pleading guilty to releasing the information, so if you want to argue he's guilty of aiding the enemy based on what he released, I'm happy to hear it. But so far, there's no evidence that he wanted to be caught.
You're trying to extrapolate character judgments from a series of online conversations between him and one individual, and the charges against him. Meanwhile, ignoring his own stated motives or things like the opinions of people who know him more intimately. It's just not convincing.
And even if the U.S. government was, Col. Lind (given that she will be the single-point-of-lightning-rod for any sentence adjudged) would not be that stupid as she probably has better things to do than get "martyred" herself after the trial is over.
But let's say that Col. Lind wants to live in a "Witness Protection"-esque program for the rest of her life... any sentence of execution has to be approved by the President himself (MCM Rule 1207), and whatever else you might say about him, he's more politically-savvy than to allow that to happen.
But wait.... this is all only possible if the death penalty was declared from the start, and the government chose from the beginning not to go for it. So it looks like "suicide by court-martial" is out of the running, at least.
Good hint on how safe/unsafe RSA actually is: "bradass87: 2048… never heard of it being broken publicly… NSA can feasibly do it, if they want to allocate national level “number-crunching” time to do it…"
Thank you.
I'd challenge you to get in contact with a reporter from either newspaper yourself. How would you go about it?
Snark aside, I've occasionally exchanged brief emails with folks at newspapers -- an op/ed writer who wrote a particular column I liked, for example. With enough persistence, I think I could get through. If I really ran into a brick wall at the Post or the Times, I'd settle for the editor of a mid-size city paper.
Manning would have still been fried, but then NYT would not have released all of them wholesale. Some things just need to be kept secret but Wikileaks released them (lack of manpower was one issue)
How quickly we forget.
"The Times has taken care not to publish information that would harm national security interests."
Seems pretty straightforward. "Vetted by" just means that the NYT had access to it beforehand, but they didn't publish it all, WikiLeaks did.
That makes me think that disclosing this topic would create even worse charges than he already faces. So a reasonable guess is that these documents are actual compartmentalized information. But of course then the question is how he was able to access them given the impression I get is his office was rather low security, not a SCIF.
It's hard not to think that there's a significant part of the story here that isn't being told.
This is part of him pleading guilty to these charges, one of which is over "more than one classified memorandum from a government intelligence agency". It's not him personally being shifty about it--that's what the charge is.
But of course then the question is how he was able to access them given the impression I get is his office was rather low security, not a SCIF.
He refers to the "T-SCIF" many times in this statement, 'T' meaning 'Temporary'. There's even a photo in the chat logs published by Wired.
That wouldn't just entail what the "enemy" is doing, that would also include what other government agencies are up to, what allies are up to, links to the other major field of combat for the Army, etc.
Given that is what his job entailed though, you would think they would have a much more stringent screening process for access to that material. With nuclear weapons they have a specific personnel reliability program (http://www.ncis.navy.mil/securitypolicy/PRP/Pages/NuclearWea...). I'm not saying they need something as stringent for intel analysts but they need to have something.
You are blaming the victim.
The military is entirely responsible for the conditions he is held under in custody. That's part of what the word custody means. A UN Torture Investigator (Juan Mendez) concluded he was living in "inhumane and degrading conditions".
And Manning isn't a victim. He released an enormous cache of classified information, directly violating an oath that he took not to, placing ISAF Forces in jeopardy and undermining the ability of the State Department (you know, the agency that tries to affect positive change in the world without the use of force) to do its job. What wrong-doing did Manning uncover; what crimes? All he succeeding in doing was harming the State Department and endangering ISAF personnel and the Afghans who aid them.
Here are some US troops shooting at unarmed civilians, children and Reuters journalists. There was never a gun held, or fired except by the US troops...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0
This is the reality of asymmetric warfare, where doing your job walking down the street in Baghdad can get you killed.
There are 1000's of such incidents we know about thanks to Manning. This happens to be the most graphic and easily understood because it is a video. Other stories are contained in the giant databases and are a couple of hundred words of text.
Personally I uncovered a case in Cablegate where the US Ambassador to Nigeria asked for someone to be rendered to the US without going through the Nigerian Courts. This constitutes extraordinary rendition, moreover, this was pre-911 before extraordinary rendition was known to be widespread.
If anybody actually looks at the material, you'll grasp its significance immediately. Moreover, there is a good chance with 250,000 cables and countless war logs if you see something significant, you are the only person in the world to have recognised the significance of that piece of information.
> This is the reality of asymmetric warfare, where doing
> your job walking down the street in Baghdad can get you
> killed.
> There are 1000's of such incidents we know about thanks to
> Manning.
> If anybody actually looks at the material, you'll grasp its
> significance immediately
My cynical view is that wikileaks was just a tool for Asange to make a name for himself. Manning? Just colateral damage.
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/201878.php
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/201889.php
Wikileaks had this information, knew that the force was armed and not civilian, knew that weapons were recovered from the scene, and intentionally lied about it when they called the video "Collateral Murder".
Here is the exact second that freeze-frame above is taken in the collateral murder video http://youtu.be/5rXPrfnU3G0?t=3m18s Compare with the picture that the US military claims is of an armed person http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/savegunsmall.JPG
That person isn't carrying anything let along a weapon.
At the exact time the US troops say "that's a weapon" (around or just after 3:13) and thus fix the belief that the group is carrying weapons, from the Apache all that is visible in shot are 2 camera men, with cameras.
What amazes me is that who ever decided to make this picture didn't go to the effort to at least make a claim that wasn't provably false from the available evidence. It's really hard to prove a negative existential statement, so that would have been on their side.
You see, you are already answering things in a menacing tone, I think you may be a risk to others, and maybe to yourself.
Dell laptops, WinRAR, wget...
You would think the army has some fancy tech, apparently not.
In that case, his network activity may not have looked unusual.
I had always had the impression that Manning had been generally dissatisfied by American geopolitics but that the FP 15 order had been the last straw for him and that he'd started divulging information to WikiLeaks all at once.
It wasn't like that at all. He released the Iraq/Afghanistan actions database way before any of that. Before he saw the "Collateral Murder" video. Before the FP 15. Even before he punched a soldier in the face (around 8 May 2010, which was his "altercation").
WTF. He was essentially a WikiLeaks mole working on the inside... even though he made clear that no one from WikiLeaks pressured him into divulging information he also freely admits that some of the information he went out of the way to find, was simply because it was a matter of discussion in the WikiLeaks IRC/Jabber chat.
He freely admits releasing documents that he felt could possibly harm the U.S. as well: "Of the documents release[d], the cables were the only one I was not absolutely certain couldn’t harm the United States."
And why did he release these cables if they were the only documents that were risky? "I believed exposing this information might make some within the Department of State and other government entities unhappy."
He also talked about reading quotes after WWI, about how "the world would be a better place if states would avoid making secret pacts and deals with and against each other." Certainly true! However he seemed to have missed the history lesson from WWII, where the U.K. and the U.S. both enjoyed significant military advantages thanks to their signals intelligence and codebreaking feats.
If Manning were as smart an intelligence analyst as he claims to be then he should know full well that information which is unclassified individually may still be a risk to national security (and therefore classified) if released as an aggregate.
The U.S. did this to the Japanese several before the Battle of Midway; for instance an increase in message traffic from the Japanese Naval base at Truk was a clue to the intelligence analysts at Station Hypo at Pearl Harbor that the Japanese fleet was prepping for a major operation, even though they couldn't break the code. (A good book to read regarding this is Ian Toll's "Pacific Crucible").
I suppose at least I can't say he was doing this to get back at the Army per se, since he'd done everything before they reduced him in rate. But conversely, much of what he leaked was not "war crimes" at all, but merely stuff to "start a debate".
I'm not really sure what to think about all of it. It seems to me that based on his very half-hearted attempts to go to the media that he was intending all along to go to WikiLeaks (whether consciously or not), and that the reasoning for it was not about specific things at all (at least the initial leaks).
I wish he would have talked about why he felt the need to brag to Lamo about it. Maybe that (talking to Lamo) was brought on by his stress from his punishment from the Army, it would almost be doubly ironic if the way he unmasked himself ultimately came about from his own fist hitting the face of another soldier.
Calling someone a "mole" that has not been recruited, has not received any kind of compensation and has gotten no commands is a a really large stretch of the meaning of the word "mole".
> He freely admits releasing documents that he felt could possibly harm the U.S. as well: "Of the documents release[d], the cables were the only one I was not absolutely certain couldn’t harm the United States."
No. That is not what he said at all. I read the complete statement three times and you are leaving out important parts. It is true, that he initially was not certain that they couldn't harm the United States. But that is why he got more information about the cables and came to the following conclusion:
"I believe that the public release of these cables would not damage the United States, however, I did believe that the cables might be embarrassing, since they represented very honest opinions and statements behind the backs of other nations and organizations."
> And why did he release these cables if they were the only documents that were risky? "I believed exposing this information might make some within the Department of State and other government entities unhappy."
Nowhere did he say that this was the reason for releasing the Cables. Those are the reasons he stated:
"The more I read the cables, the more I came to the conclusion that this was the type of information that should become public. I once read a and used a quote on open diplomacy written after the First World War and how the world would be a better place if states would avoid making secret pacts and deals with and against each other."
> He also talked about reading quotes after WWI, about how "the world would be a better place if states would avoid making secret pacts and deals with and against each other." Certainly true! However he seemed to have missed the history lesson from WWII, where the U.K. and the U.S. both enjoyed significant military advantages thanks to their signals intelligence and codebreaking feats.
Those quotes were from a book with the topic "Open Diplomacy". He was talking about the reason for releasing the diplomatic cables and not about nuclear missile codes or secret uboot positions.
> I'm not really sure what to think about all of it. It seems to me that based on his very half-hearted attempts to go to the media that he was intending all along to go to WikiLeaks (whether consciously or not), and that the reasoning for it was not about specific things at all (at least the initial leaks).
Yes, he knew that he would get caught eventually (right before he started releasing the material) and that is why he went to two different newspapers just to make sure he does not look like a wikileaks mole once he got caught.
Your entire post is twisting the facts just to make him look bad. I am giving you the benefit of the doubt and believe you haven't read the statement thoroughly.
Also this is just BM's statement. So it must not necessarily be true.
But when we are talking about this statement, let's stay with the facts.
So individual soldiers now get to decide which information is actually sensitive and which is not?
Also, should GMail start leaking emails from Fortune 500 companies and local/state governments by the same logic you employ?
> Your entire post is twisting the facts just to make him look bad.
I'm trying to evaluate and see to the underlying reality. People will try to say what they think puts them in the best light while hinting around what might actually be the core of the issue (I'm certainly no different unless I pay close attention to what made it into the textarea).
I mean, practically the worst thing you could say in that courtroom if you're trying to avoid lengthy jail time is a variant of "Oh, I just felt like starting a public debate on topic $FOO". Especially when that was the reason for your first-ever leak.
At least with the FP 15 and the Reuters FOIA issues pretty much anyone who isn't cold-blooded can easily sympathize with Manning. I simply would have expected him to come across those issues first, not essentially last.
> Yes, he knew that he would get caught eventually (right before he started releasing the material) and that is why he went to two different newspapers just to make sure he does not look like a wikileaks mole once he got caught.
Come. ON. Army CID, Army IG, DoD IG, the Chaplain, a medical mental health practitioner, actually going to a physical office of the NYT or WaPo. He could have (but didn't) do any of these if he wanted to avoid the accusation of pre-selecting WikiLeaks.
That's not even the weirdest part. He was already lurking in their chat, soon to be friends (as he perceived it) with DDB or Assange, their ethics and geopolitics were right up his alley, etc. That part doesn't even surprise me one bit, I see his failure to motivate himself to go to a media source every week, when I fail to wake up 2 hours early on Monday "because I'm going to start working out". That's just basic human psychology. The seed had already been planted in his mind, it was just a matter of how long it would take for him to convince himself that he could live with himself.
With this much I'm 100% in agreement with jacquesm elsewhere: He should never have been screened for that position. Raw intelligence cannot be the sole or primary determining factor for what position you're assigned.
Not even remotely what anyone who argues in favor of Manning's actions is arguing... there should be a limit to the amount of morally questionable information an employee should let happen before he/she decides to blow the whistle.
Manning committed a crime, quite willingly, because he viewed the end result as being worth some amount of personal sacrifice/inconvenience.
<jest>I must admit your style of argument (smart but bizarrely tangential) makes me wonder if you are part of some kind of astroturfing campaign targeting the HN discussion of this topic.</jest>
Very few people have sufficient courage of their convictions to consider doing what he did. The rest of the psychological portait is noise.
The biggest question was always why. His supporters claimed it was about war crimes, but it couldn't be that by sheer breadth of unrelated information he leaked.
The motive of getting back at the Army at least made sense, but he makes fairly clear that his NJP was the last thing that happened, not the first.
So an idealistic quandary? Perhaps he wasn't yet sufficiently jaded but he had to have known nothing would change going that route. By leaking indiscriminately, at such sheer scale, and information that's not actually pointing to a war crime or other government malfeasance he opens the government up to many defenses against what the information contained.
But either way, he said he wouldn't. He said further that if he did uncover evidence of wrongdoing that he would report it properly.
I mean let's put it a different way. You provide a SaaS/PaaS /what-have-you to a Fortune 50 enterprise.
What, ethically, would stop you from snooping at their data and leaking it? If you contort your logic enough, as happened to Manning, you could easily flip it around entirely to claim that you had a moral imperative to look for wrongdoing in the emails and documents of these large multi-nationals that affect so many lives across the world.
Presumably we can rely on the tech startups incubated at HN not to do this, but why? Why would it be OK for Manning and not your cloud provider? Why would it not be OK for the cloud provider and OK for Manning?
I guess in the end that's what I wonder most about, even now. Why?
I and probably millions of others have had the opportunity "to start a public debate" if that's all we were worried about, but we didn't. Why did Manning? L'appel du vide? The stress of being LGBT in the military? And how can we balance the need for transparency in military and government with the very real need for INFOSEC to protect the same?
Given that, IMHO it comes down to a moral judgement on just how terrible the actions the company was committing.
Situation A: Working at a SaaS email company, in the course of my work fixing an email bug, I find out one of their low level executives is engaging in some light embezzlement of company funds, say to the tune of $100K.
Situation B: Working at a SaaS email company, in the course of my work fixing an email bug, I find out the company has been dumping toxic waste into a local river which, by the company's own internal admission, is leading to highly increased risks of cancer, birth defects and brain damage for the inhabitants of nearby towns.
For me personally, situation A is not "evil" enough to my moral compass, nor will my exposing it make that big of a difference in the world for me to risk exposing it. However, situation B would cause me to really stop and think about if it's worth risking spending many years in jail to expose what amounts to my moral compass as crimes against humanity. I'd like to think I'd have the courage to expose it.
Privacy policies are just human constructions meant to make human and societal interaction more fluid. But if an individual or group starts to flagrantly break written and unwritten rules of human decency and societal organization, it rings as fair to my mind to fight back. "I won't fuck with you if you don't fuck with me" is out the window once an organization goes too far in the fucking with me department. Especially if it's an organization like a government who writes its own rules and then breaks them.
OK, I would actually tend to agree (and for what it's worth, so would DoD and the law).
But when does the aggregate of those "minor" issues become so large that you'd feel it's a major Sit-B issue? It seems to me that if you simply scoured long enough at a large enough company that you should eventually have enough to feel that you have something major, simply by definition.
So then the question might become, why don't email providers do this (search their clients communications and files)? The threat of the law isn't the answer as everyone would simply remind you that you have a moral imperative to break the law.
I'm not trying to pose these questions to you personally at this point but they certainly bear thinking about, especially nowadays when we're trying to migrate everything to the cloud. At some point (if you're a tech at a cloud provider) you have to think that they only reason you don't see evil on your servers is because you're not looking hard enough.
I think the argument can be made that Manning truly believed in the goal of the US war effort, and could not stand to see the US doing things that he viewed as hypocritical. To someone in his position, living every day fighting a war that most of us are clueless about, the idea that the organization he was a part of had some bad apples, or worse that it had structural rot and corruption, would have been dispiriting and infuriating, and something that he was willing to take personal risk to fix.
So I think that to consider Manning's thoughts and actions unusual you have to make the argument that the military is full of cynics who just roll their eyes when atrocities happen or buffoons who drink the patriotism kool-ade and view the US as being capable of no wrong...
Manning had unique intellect, unique skills, and unique access to data. He was also in the small minority of people familiar with Wikileaks and ballsy enough to risk his own life by leaking information. There are probably many people in the military and in various corporate jobs who view Manning as a hero but who lack the personal courage to do what he did.
What would you assume would happen if a whistleblower stepped forward and revealed lies and corruption... I might have predicted initial outrage followed by reforms and the eventual pardon of the whistleblower. Manning's case shows us that the actual result is years in prison without charge, a massive attempted cover-up, and all kinds of shady behavior by the US Government. There has still to date been no reform undertaken other than to prevent information leaks through the methods Manning used.
Oddly the US news media has not called for reforms even as a counter-balance to its coverage of Manning (and its coverage of Assange's so-called rape charges). It would seem to require virtually no courage on the part of journalists to address the question of reforms even as a subtext to the sensationalism and propaganda.
Which one are we talking about, a whistleblower or Bradley Manning?
Questions of conscience are usually best answered by oneself. Manning can speak about why he did and you can speak about why you didn't.
As far as I could tell from the statement that was linked, he came to no conclusion more specific than that "war sucks" when leaking the SIGACTs. Good job, but we've known that since before the Code of Hammurabi.
Did he really think that Americans were convinced that no civilian casualties ever occurred, or that a population of hundreds of thousands (that had been a bunch of high schoolers just a few years prior) were 100% "good guys" without exception? Many of those soldiers aren't even old enough to drink. That wasn't an oversight; the public has known, and always have.
That is the big difference from the Pentagon Papers. In that situation it was uncovered that the President had been trying to force the country to war. Here we already know why we're at war (9/11 and Dubya for Afghanistan and Iraq resp.). Manning had nothing to add about why the U.S. was at war. A 'smoking gun' revealing gov't interference beyond what is already known for Iraq would have been useful, at least.
So, if that [war being bad] was his reason for wanting to "start a public debate" it was pointless, completely dead on arrival. And in the event, look what happened. A bunch of people have died in Africa and the Middle East, but the military plans of the U.S. itself were never seriously questioned, let alone altered. The U.S. still goes after Islamists, don't they?
> Manning can speak about why he did and you can speak about why you didn't.
Oh you're so cute, with your Cloak of Superior Morality. Answer this for me: You're obviously skilled with computing, why aren't you extracting the information you need, if it's a moral imperative?
For what it's worth I'm pretty sure that everything I'm holding onto is actually better in the grand scheme of things but by all means, point out my "guilty conscience" to me.
For me it's clear that the videos show a breech of International Law and possibly a war crime. Does the United States abide by International Law? Of course not. It doesn't even abide by the Geneva Convention. Nor even by its own constitution. When people look and see a 'republic' or a 'democracy'... this is illusion. It's spin. It's a fairy tale.
And as the ongoing Hedges v. Obama is showing, in all likely hood the US government is already torturing disappeared US citizens in black sites somewhere unknown.
As soon as anyone tries to shine light on these crimes (and they are crimes) they invoke powers that allow them to bury them and bring the full force of their system down on them to send a message to others. None of this is going to work. The more they try and surpress it, the more it will flare up. Bradley Manning is just one of the visible victims. There are and will be many more victims. Not least the many millions of innocents killed in foreign lands.
The western nations are an empire in decline. The middle class is decimated. The economy is toast. The numbers are all fabricated. It's all down hill from here. And as the BRICS rise, do you think they are going to forgive us our trespasses? Of course not. They are going to hold us down and fuck us for a long, long time. And frankly, we all deserve it.
I'm doing what I can, no need to worry. And I refused to go into the army on penalty of (significant) jailtime, got off very lucky but I would have happily gone to jail to avoid becoming someone else's tool.
No cloak of super morality here, just one guy deciding for himself.
We're talking about massacres and real loss of life here.
Manning seems to be the kind of person who viewed his role in the institution of the military to be relatively powerless, but who had an appreciation for the power the press wields in shaping public debate and policy.
In my opinion, only a very naive person would assume that Manning would dutifully report his findings up the chain of command and feel relieved of any moral duty once his superiors were notified.
Most people have strong moral convictions, but when placed in a situation where their whole future hinges on temporarily shutting those moral convictions down will happily do so. Someone that is unstable at some level could very well act them out because they identify with the basic injustice, even if that will end up hurting themselves.
It seems to me that it would make someone behave more randomly
I think he's talking about instability as in issues with inhibition. Kind of like how people sometimes commit the stark crime of saying what you really think when drunk,
Manning might have taken an action that others merely only think about because that little part of you that says "BAD IDEA MAN" was asleep on watch at the time. If nothing else his "instability" would be consistent with his behavior at other times, before and after he joined the Army.
Or alternately, the difference between a good thing, and a good thing with collateral damage.
>> Shortly after the second engagement, a mechanized infantry unit arrives at the scene. Within >> minutes, the aerial weapons team crew learns that children were in the van and despite the >> injuries the crew exhibits no remorse. Instead, they downplay the significance of their actions, >> saying quote ‘Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kid’s into a battle’ unquote.
>> The aerial weapons team crew members sound like they lack sympathy for the children or the >> parents. Later in a particularly disturbing manner, the aerial weapons team verbalizes enjoyment >> at the sight of one of the ground vehicles driving over a body– or one of the bodies. As I >> continued my research, I found an article discussing the book, The Good Soldiers, written by >> Washington Post writer David Finkel.
>> He writes that the soldier finds him and sees him gesture with his two forefingers together, a >> common method in the Middle East to communicate that they are friendly. However, instead of >> assisting him, the soldier makes an obscene gesture extending his middle finger.
>> The individual apparently dies shortly thereafter. Reading this, I can only think of how this >> person was simply trying to help others, and then he quickly finds he needs help as well. To make >> matter worse, in the last moments of his life, he continues to express his friendly gesture– only >> to find himself receiving this well known gesture of unfriendliness. For me it’s all a big mess, >> and I am left wondering what these things mean, and how it all fits together. It burdens me >> emotionally.
This is all that matters... the discussion on Bradley is valid but why isn't US/these soldiers on a court to answer this sort of shit? You should be ashamed of your country and try to do something about it
So many lies, fuck the power.