The Bradley Manning Saga

[Citizen X]

Bradley Manning was recently sentenced to 35 years for the biggest leak of secrets in US history.

He now plans to live as a female and has a chosen name: Chelsea. Well that’s his right and the civil groups will have a field day with the authorities, especially seeing that he also applied for a presidential pardon from Barack Obama.

He apparently announced the decision yesterday in a written statement. In such statement he requests hormonal treatment to assist the transition. If he wasn’t in jail, he could have made this choice and if he had the means paid for it. He is now a sentenced convict. He wants and expects at the State expense that they fund the entire process from initial hormonal treatment through to completion.

He said in such statement "As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible,"

He even has a military posted photo of him dressed as a woman with a wig and lipstick. The thing is the military in the US have never had to deal with such a matter before.

“Fort Leavenworth is an all-male prison. But the staff has some leeway to separate soldiers from the other inmates based on the risk to themselves and others, prison spokesman George Marcec said.”

My only thoughts are that this is a bizarre twist of events in such a huge USA case against one of its own.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-...named-chelsea/

[wynn]

Stick it to them Bradley....err.....I mean Chelsea '))

[Didditmiself]

Vanash, I think the bigger issue here is whether Manning did the world a favour when he released all those cables to Wikileaks
about the USA or not. What do you (and the others on TFSA) think?

[Citizen X]

A very good evening to you Pete,

I sincerely feel that Bradley Manning is a traitor, I’m surprised that he didn’t receive the death penalty! Regardless of the content he revealed, you don’t betray your own country. Such investigations into civilian Casualties should have come from the UN and bodies such as Amesty International etc.

One must never forget that he served as a soldier, a position which calls for loyalty and trust.

[carl0s]

A very good evening to you Pete,

I sincerely feel that Bradley Manning is a traitor, I’m surprised that he didn’t receive the death penalty! Regardless of the content he revealed, you don’t betray your own country. Such investigations into civilian Casualties should have come from the UN and bodies such as Amesty International etc.

One must never forget that he served as a soldier, a position which calls for loyalty and trust.

I think it's wrong to consider it as him "passing secrets to the enemy". That's not what he did. He released the information from a good moral standing, in an effort to bring justice and accountability to those doing very immoral/illegal things, and hopefully bring about a change in that behaviour. That does not a traitor make.

I wonder if we might all be inadvertently over-influenced (maybe brainwashed??) by modern propaganda from who we have always been lead to believe are the "good guys". Revelations such as these reaffirm my suspicions in that regard.

All this shady stuff regarding Assange - the Swedes want him so badly yet they won't simply give a guarantee that they won't hand him over to the USA?

and the other whistleblower - Edward Snowden - look at the crazy stuff that happened to Evo Morale's airplane. That's just crazy stuff. America is embarrassed and knows that it does things that the people would not want in their name, and it's doing everything it can to hide that bad behaviour, and prevent future bad behaviour getting out. I know a lot of countries do or have done bad things to their people, or their captives, but our teachers and the media are all to happy to educate us about that. All the while we're supposed to keep thinking that our guys are glorious frickin' angels.

[Citizen X]

I think it's wrong to consider it as him "passing secrets to the enemy". That's not what he did. He released the information from a good moral standing, in an effort to bring justice and accountability to those doing very immoral/illegal things, and hopefully bring about a change in that behaviour. That does not a traitor make.

I wonder if we might all be inadvertently over-influenced (maybe brainwashed??) by modern propaganda from who we have always been lead to believe are the "good guys". Revelations such as these reaffirm my suspicions in that regard.

All this shady stuff regarding Assange - the Swedes want him so badly yet they won't simply give a guarantee that they won't hand him over to the USA?

and the other whistleblower - Edward Snowden - look at the crazy stuff that happened to Evo Morale's airplane. That's just crazy stuff. America is embarrassed and knows that it does things that the people would not want in their name, and it's doing everything it can to hide that bad behaviour, and prevent future bad behaviour getting out. I know a lot of countries do or have done bad things to their people, or their captives, but our teachers and the media are all to happy to educate us about that. All the while we're supposed to keep thinking that our guys are glorious frickin' angels.

Good morning Carlos,

You raise pretty fair points.
Notwithstanding this, my position is that he served as a soldier in a position of trust. This position gave him access to documents which are privileged or classified. He knew that disclosing such information and/or documents even to a family member in secret and on a once off basis would have constituted an offence, despite this he still betrayed his very own country on what has been described as a large scale!

This is what the prosecutor had to say of him:

"He was not a troubled young soul," Fein said. "He was not a whistleblower. He was traitor -- a traitor who understood the value of compromised information in the hands of the enemy."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/25/bradley-manning-closing-arguments_n_3653466.html

Let’s assume that he done this between 1775 and 1783 during the American revolution. Suppose he passed some documents on to the British thinking that he was acting out of morality or good conscience; I think it’s safe to say that even George Washington would have personally ordered his execution had it come to his knowledge. I doubt very much that Thomas Jefferson would have objected. I actually think he would have supported a decision to have Manning shot.

As a soldier in a position of trust Manning had a duty to obey and not to betray trust.
I don’t condone the killing of any civilians regardless of who they are. This is the reason why the media, the UN and bodies such as Amesty International exist. They need to make the world aware of such things..

[AndyD]

Regardless of the content he revealed, you don’t betray your own country.

Surely this is the line of thought that ends up with people like the Nazi officers who were instrumental in the murder of millions and were 'just following orders'. The Neurenberg trials didn't agree with you.

[Citizen X]

Surely this is the line of thought that ends up with people like the Nazi officers who were instrumental in the murder of millions and were 'just following orders'. The Neurenberg trials didn't agree with you.

A very good afternoon to you Andy,

Touché. The sad thing about the holocaust is that the West knew what taking place and didn’t initially react.
1. More directly to your assertion though is the consideration of type of government. The Nazis were fascists whereas the USA, despite its shortcomings is a democracy. So the question is how should a soldier behave in a democracy?
2. In Nazi Germany all the atrocious steps taken to oppress the Jewish people were actually taken publicly and was even reported in the press. The Foreign mass media of that day commented vociferously on Nazi anti-Jewish activity. It’s now a historical fact that the USA made such information available to relevant Jewish leaders in November 1942. It was made public shortly thereafter. The Allies were actually aware of what the Germans had already done to the Jewish people at an early stage
3.Eventually, the American Government confirmed the reports to Jewish leaders in late November 1942. They were publicized immediately thereafter. While the details were neither complete nor wholly accurate, the Allies were aware of most of what the Germans had done to the Jews at a relatively early date.

“The response of the Allies to the persecution and destruction of European Jewry was inadequate. Only in January 1944 was an agency, the War Refugee Board, established for the express purpose of saving the victims of Nazi persecution. Prior to that date, little action was taken. On December 17, 1942, the Allies issued a condemnation of Nazi atrocities against the Jews, but this was the only such declaration made prior to 1944.”[1]

With Nazi Germany the bigger issue of morality was that countries which had power to act failed to act timeously.

4. With Manning, he/she was serving under a democracy in the capacity of a soldier. Common sense should have told him/her that what he/she was doing was treason. Besides the media were already reporting on civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. Again, I don’t condone the killing of any civilians by any military

In South Africa jurisprudence it's an established principal that you actually welcome to break the law as long as you are willing to face the consequences!

Back to Nazi Germany:
There was selective morality at Nuremburg! Not all that should have been tried were in actual fact tried. One would imagine that the scientist who developed the v1 and v2 rockets which killed indiscriminately i.e. just landed in any civilian area in Britian and exploded would be on the list of those to have been tried at Nuremburg. No so!
Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun, developed these rockets that killed so many civilians. He was aware of their purpose. Yet after WW11, the USA actually recruited him. H worked on the United States Army intermediate range ballistic missile. In 1975 he received a medal from the states for his contribution!

Back to Manning: If he truly had a sense of morality, he would have only released the documents that pertained to the civillian killing.

Let’s assume that the court held that based upon his sense of morality he is acquitted on charges pertaining to specific documents regarding civilian killing, let’s assume further that the court states that the leaking of the diplomatic cables is a treasonous act and grants the death penalty. What would now be wrong with this scenario?

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[1]http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=394663#20. Accessed 26 August 2013

[wynn]

One must never forget that he served as a soldier, a position which calls for loyalty and trust.

So it was alright for Nazis to kill Jews because they were loyal trustworthy soldiers? crimes against civilians are crimes and need to be outed and all the other crap also needed airing same as with Edward Snowdon, I am sure they both considered what they did very carefully before they blew the whistle.
I don't like the Idea that USA killed innocent news cameramen or the fact that they are possibly spying on me!!!

[tec0]

So it was alright for Nazis to kill Jews because they were loyal trustworthy soldiers? crimes against civilians are crimes and need to be outed and all the other crap also needed airing same as with Edward Snowdon, I am sure they both considered what they did very carefully before they blew the whistle.
I don't like the Idea that USA killed innocent news cameramen or the fact that they are possibly spying on me!!!

It is a 100% fact that your emails goes trough a few systems every second and if enough red flags popup someone will read it to see if action needs to be taken or not. The truth is these systems have existed since the "cold war" and evolved into something spectacular. Imagine all those wonderful CPU farms working with clever software to figure out what is going on inside your head.

Millions upon millions of pages of emails that gets scanned every time you hit the send button. It sounds like science-fiction but its not...