They do not have the right to unilaterally decide to violate a lawful order because they think it is better for humanity at large. They do not have the right to expose classified information because they think it shouldn't be classified. They do not have the right to violate orders because they are stupid, or because they're bad policy.
They do not have the right to make those decisions because, in the US, the military is supposed to be entirely subordinate to the laws enacted by our elected officials. Not "subordinate as long as it's for the best overall." This is a good thing--when enough members of the military decide to do what's better for the country against the lawful orders of the elected government that they serve, we call it a coup.
Obviously there are grey areas. After all, the Nuremburg trials punished people for violating laws that didn't exist during the commission of the crimes. If Manning had, say, only released extremely strong evidence of war crimes, I might agree that hiding that evidence was itself unlawful. But he didn't--he released a giant trove of classified diplomatic cables and military logs. These may have been unnecessarily classified, but were not unlawfully classified. Releasing them put Manning firmly in the "violating lawful orders" camp.
I'm not disputing that Manning broke the laws of the military. But calling his actions an incipient coup is laughable. In a world in which the worst offenders at Abu Ghraib got ten years (and were released much sooner), sentencing him to 35 years (as a deterrent!) is a disgrace. I don't see how you can defend the laws and regulations of an organization where it's much better to commit a crime against humanity than to publicize one and err on the side of too much info.
Does that mean that Manning doesn't deserve his sentence? If so, how?
> I don't see how you can defend the laws and regulations of an organization where it's much better to commit a crime against humanity than to publicize one and err on the side of too much info.
I hate this about Manning's supporters. He exposed a small amount of wrongdoing with his leaking. The majority of the stuff he leaked didn't show any kind of criminal behavior, and instead exposed internal communications by US govt officials for no legitimate purpose. These leaks damaged relationships with foreign governments and jeopardized the lives of people in foreign nations employed by or cooperating with the US.
Stop pretending that he was a selfless warrior for truth and justice.
Because it is immoral to remove a fellow human's freedom for lengthy periods of time unless absolutely necessary, when there is no other way to protect the public from their future actions. For example, in the case of unreformable violent criminals, who must be physically restrained lest they injure others if unrestrained, there may be no other option than multiyear or even (in rare cases) multi-decade imprisonment. But that does not happen often, and even most people who committed violent crimes pose much less risk once they grow older.
There is no way you would be sentenced to 35 years for a nonviolent crime here (Denmark), because the idea is preposterous. Not even if you leaked something that offended the fairly influential and US/NATO-loving military. Sentences longer than 2 years are rare, reserved only for extreme crimes (murder, rape, etc.), which seems quite correct.
Americans seems somewhat vengeful, even sadistic on the subject, rather than rational. Somehow absurdly long sentences like confining someone in a cage for 5 years or even 10 years is seen as a "short" sentence, I guess because compared to locking people in a cage for 30 or 50 years or outright killing them, it seems lenient in comparison. You even hear people joking gleefully about prison rape. Not sure how you could approach fixing that culture.
Abu Ghraib also damaged international relations and placed American lives at increased risk from terrorism. Plus, you know, it involved physically torturing people, not chatting online with Julian Assange.
Yet it is only Manning's crime that's judged worthy of deterrence (by a 3.5 times larger punishment). That's because his real fault is that of exposing the inner workings of a style of policy making that can only function effectively as long as the public is kept ignorant. Only this kind of a crime can "undermine the entire system", as the prosecutor very frankly put it.
Abu Ghraib may have embarrassed America, but the real no-no is exposing its government.
Abu Ghraib was horrific, but it was close enough to what was ordered to be done by Mi, by the CIA, by special forces (water boarding, walling, stress positions, sleep deprivation) that no one thinks the soldiers really disregarded the chain of command (aside from the standing orders against prisoner treatment which others were by direct order ignoring), they just got out of hand. So from the military's point of view, it's not a discipline problem.
Abu Ghraib, as a systemic thing, is deterred by simple never issuing orders to do that kind of thing again and making it explicitly clear that it's prohibited. After all, non of the soldiers involved thought they were explicitly disobeying their superiors, they thought they were doing what everyone else did. If ordered not to torture people, they would not torture people.
Manning, on the other head, disregarded lawful orders stemming from the civilian command authority to protect information. He didn't do it because what he leaked exposed crimes against humanity(he leaked far more than leak the "collateral murder" video), he did it because he thought he knew what was best.
Soldiers don't get to decide what they think is best with in the context of lawful orders. If they could, they might decide they know what is best for the country and stage a coup, or frag their commanding officer, or any number of other things.
That's what they needed to deter.
Didn't independent studies/orgs show that this wasn't true, and was just a phrase paraded around by the government to get the public against Manning?
And no offense, but what is the simplest explanation here? That a bunch of collaborator names were leaked and not a single person was put into harm's way as a result of that? Keep in mind that we're not talking about some random subdivision of the IRS, we're talking about the organization that gunned down Malala and detonated a bomb in the middle of a policeman's funeral.
If truth hurts it's not a good sign.
The system is only effective at hiding information from citiziens, who are not able to access the very information that politicians use to guide their decisions. That is, of course, why they happily go on record with blatant lies, at no risk of being exposed. Contrast this with their complete non-statements in this current NSA situation; they would rather make no statement at all than be exposed as a liar, for no one knows what else Snowden/Greenwald will release that could make previous statements look like disinformation.
I love every single one of my friends dearly and would go to great lengths for them. But for any one I can point to a list of things that are flawed about them, and I'm sure every one of them could put together a long list of things flawed about me. I'd be pissed at someone who told one of my friends that, e.g. I thought they had unrealistic expectations about potential mates given their own looks, because the only reason someone would do that would be to either hurt my friend or to hurt me.
Human relationships are very often about delicacy, and part and parcel of delicacy is knowing what thoughts to share and what not to share. When someone takes away that discretion and makes that decision for you, you are entitled to get mad.
- I notice you! Here's some meaningless words acknowledging the fact. - I noticed you too. Please don't tell me anything about your life unless it's exciting but not making me envy you in any way. - Same to you, and please don't waste my time anymore now unless you are going to benefit me in some way. - I'm going to depart now, and I don't care how the rest of you day goes. - Neither do I for you.
I would submit a world like this would be perceived as utterly bizarre by most of us.
Well, I am sorry to say that in fact society is that brittle and you are being lied to in one fashion or another most of the time.
I do want to clarify what I mean by lying though because it would be easy to interpret what I am saying as conspiratorial. In fact what I mean is that your information diet is nearly completely full with selective information, weasel words, legalese and implied trust. The constructs between nations and even within our nation are the same and often worse than interpersonal relations. So the reason that you trust any entity is not because they are moral pillars, its because they don't show you the questionable things that people do on a day to day basis that make little difference. This is exactly the argument against the widespread intelligence gathering - everyone is doing something illegal at pretty much any time. Similarly everyone, whether they know it or not lies to others on a daily basis (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/homo-consumericus/201111...)
So yes, it really is that fragile and it is insanely magnified at the global politics level way beyond you would even imagine.
And you don't believe bit more honesty might be in order?
We used to like having slaves. All people used to hate gays and atheists. Women used to be perceived as incapable of having public lives.
At some point we might reach the conclusion that being lied to is not all that convenient because truth eventually comes out and if it's too far from perception it leads to shitstorms.
People can change. But they do not change by themselves. There is always some kind of technological advancement that forces people to change their ways. I sincerely hope that internet will lead us to more honest lives.
Indeed you are correct that the truth will come out and I am the first person to support full transparency. I do know however that in this example, if the Japanese said they don't know what they are doing, please help - the people in charge would lose their jobs immediately. So it's not just a one way street with people being honest, it is also the public and everyone who has a voice understanding that there is a difference between incompetence, hostile intent and accidents.
People at the basic level demand perfection from people in power - so those in power do everything that they can to make it look like they are either infallible, or are victims. In one way or another how we as a society respond to failure that will determine how truthful we can be. If we continue to have the zero fault mindset for those in power, they will continue to lie.
Or I forget how the quote goes, but anyways I thought we supported the concept of privacy in general on this site. Governments need privacy to serve the interests of their people for the same reason people need privacy to serve their own interest.
Government should operate in the open. I might understand need for military secrecy of government of a small country in unfriendly region, but not for a broad secrecy of the government that has has largest military force in the world at its disposal. Unless you think that all this NSA thing is all good because government needs to have its privacy when it's spying you.
From what I heard relationships with foreign governments were damaged by the fact that foreign governments found out that friendly diplomacy called them chumps behind their backs. When the truth about this talk and how american diplomats understand words "friend" or "ally" leaked out it did hurt. As I said, if revealing what you really think about others hurts you, that's not a good sign. It's a sign that you might be kind of an asshole.
If you ask me the real war crime is that the administration we had at the time went to war in Iraq in the first place, based on an apparent mixture of personal animus between Presidents Bush & Hussein and an alarmingly thin piece of social engineering by an Iraqi criminal/defector known as 'Curveball' who wanted to (at best) destabilize the Saddam Hussein regime or (at worst, but quite understandably) evade prison in Iraq. This entirely optional conflict led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, or by some counts >1 million, while (IMHO) significantly prolonging the war in Afghanistan by turning that theater into a sideshow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB234/index.htm
I don't think Manning's information releases revealed very much about the war in Iraq other than to shed light on this particular helicopter incident which I think falls rather short of being a war crime, although I do think it was worth bringing to public attention.
On the other hand, I see no public benefit whatsoever in teh release of all the State Department cables, and as far as I can make out Manning took them and Assange released them just because they were classified by default. When their full contents became available because of carelessness with the crypto key outcome was some diplomatic red faces but there sure wasn't any big reveal of criminal activity.
Abu Ghraib was a war crime, not a crime against humanity.
The difference however is Abu Ghraib didn't put intelligence sources at risk, it didn't endanger the lives of people. How many people died in Abu Ghraib from being photographed with underwear on their head? How many innocent lives were put at risk because of Abu Ghraib? I am certainly not defending the soldiers involved in that situation but to try and draw some moral relativism between the two cases is absurd. You likely have no idea how Americans are treated by the Taliban and Al Q when they're captured.
Ask Daniel Pearl: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Pearl
By the way, the guys in Abu were fighting on the same side as the guys that beheaded Daniel Pearl. They were combatants. They weren't innocent little girls walking to school. The irony is if the US soldiers at Abu had shot those prisoners on the battlefield, nobody would have complained, but they put underwear on their heads and the world freaks the hell out, yet quietly forgetting about cases like Daniel Pearl. We could argue Geneva convention all day long, but until the Taliban is a signatory to that convention or wears uniforms declaring themselves as part of a legitimate military force, the Geneva Conventions never applied, though of course we (meaning the US military) still follow those rules. And those that didn't -- were punished.
While we're so busy being outraged, let's get outraged about the Taliban stoning women to death. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-15688354 Bradley Manning helped the Taliban find informants. http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/taliban-study-wi...
One specific and direct result of Manning is the case of Shakil Afridi, the doctor in Pakistan that helped find Bin Laden. He's in a Pakistan prison for 30 years after ostensibly being tortured.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-18175964
Since Mr. Manning directly made his discovery possible, what punishment should Manning receive? There are dozens and dozens of intelligence sources and relationships that were significantly harmed because of Manning.
If you have ever spent any time with a security clearance, you'd know that there are countless unintended consequences that result from revealing a source or a collection method. Being morally outraged over Bradley Manning puts you in the same shoes as a Taliban sympathizer because not only was Manning a soldier, sworn to uphold the Constitution, the lives of his fellow soldiers, allies and others were in his hands. He was given a position of public trust and the responsibility that goes with it. Yet because he had emotional and personal problems he chose to do what he did.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/psychologist-wikile...
A raw information dump isn't "blowing the whistle," it's an intent to inflict harm on the United States and allies. If you wanted to expose a security hole in Gmail, for example, you wouldn't expose every single gmail user's information. You'd expose the amount necessary to reveal the problem. The simple truth is that Manning is a kid, he's intelligent to some degree, but he certainly isn't an Edward Snowden. Manning had no idea what he was doing. By his own words he said he didn't intend to harm the United States. Either he's a liar or a complete fool.
There are countless intelligence and diplomatic relationships that have been harmed, in addition to people who have been directly killed, captured or targeted as a result of Manning.
Snowden on the other hand, released information about illegal activities against US citizens that were in direct violation of the law. The Snowden releases, while potentially compromising national security from a strategic standpoint, didn't put any lives at direct risk. Manning's releases however put dozens of people directly in the line of fire. I am not going to defend Snowden, however a better case could be made for him than Manning and certainly no comparison could be made to Abu Ghraib. That's just tomfoolery.
Your obsession with terrorists' lack of scruples is causing you to become what you hate. You think it's OK to humiliate and torture them because they're terrorists, they think it's OK to behead us because of religion and nationality. How about a little show of strength and dealing with them without lowering to their level?
Did it? Did he already cut off people's heads, blow up markets and issued fatwas calling for murdering infidels? Or did he just express an opinion that maybe war prisoner abuse, while being undeniably bad, is not the same as murdering innocent people or perpetrating genocide? If in your eyes that makes one the same as terrorist, your priorities are seriously messed up.
Manadel al-Jamadi is a pretty compelling witness to the falsity of this claim.
The hell it didn't. (I stopped reading there, so maybe you made some good points later on.)
By discarding any pretense of adherence to the Geneva Convention, Abu Ghraib put every US soldier at risk.
At risk of what? What was already happening to both soldiers and civilians? You can't mean torture, death, or imprisonment. Hell, the Taliban and the like were doing far, far worse already.
So, I'm honestly curious, what was the increased risk?
> so maybe you made some good points later on.
The OP made mention of how Manning's leak directly led to intelligence sources imprisonment and death.
I wonder if there is anything other than suspicious backing up your claims here?
For one thing, not all of the US's potential adversaries are radical Islamists. In future conventional wars, we will need the moral authority to demand that our prisoners be treated in accordance with international laws and treaty obligations. Debacles like Abu Ghraib -- to say nothing of the Iraq war in general -- rob us of that moral authority, in much the same way that the Roman Catholic Church loses some of its moral authority every time another child sex abuse case comes to light. To occupy the high ground, you must first take it.
The OP made mention of how Manning's leak directly led to intelligence sources imprisonment and death.
No, orchestrating a bogus public health campaign led to Afridi's imprisonment. As far as I'm concerned, Afridi can take his place next to Mengele in medical infamy.
Manning did an unalloyed good thing in bringing the CIA's tactic to light [1]. I want foreign operatives to tell the Agency to fuck off when they come up with ideas like, "Hey, let's start a vaccination program so we can subvert the local populace and find our bad guy."
You seem to think that the ends justify the means. That's great, as long as you have perfect knowledge of future consequences. In that sense, both the US government and Bradley Manning made the same logical error. The difference is, his actions had some positive consequences as well as negative ones.
[1]: If, in fact, he did. There seems to be some disagreement with briandear's (lack of a) citation on this.
A little wrinkle here is that most US adversaries in recent wars didn't give a flying duck about US moral authority. And there's no reason why that would change - it's not like US is going to war with Sweden or Canada. Not that supposedly civilized countries aren't capable of mass atrocities - look at what Germans did in 20th century. Did they care for the moral authority of the Jews they mass-murdered? I highly doubt so.
Moral authority is important only for US and only because winning the war while destroying one's society may not be worth it.
>>>> The difference is, his actions had some positive consequences as well as negative ones.
You mean, actions of US government don't have positive consequences? I think you're getting way ahead of the facts here.
(Shrug) Unless you owned a lot of HAL or another big contractor, the Iraq war didn't have a lot of upside.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/feb/04/iraq.unitednati...
When Abu Ghraib was publicised, a lot of moderate taliban would have become radicalised. That seems rather logical to me.
In the specific case of soldiers in Iraq, at risk of radicalisation of that part of the population which, prior to the events at Abu Ghraib and them becoming known in Iraq (which occurred before they were leaked in the West), had been supportive (or at least tolerant) of the occupation.
For the rest of the military, a greater risk of hostile populations and bigger psyops advantages for adversaries in foreign operations.
just because someone mentions something, does not make it true.
up is down.
Depends on how you define such, your examples meet old UN definition, Abu Ghraib meets newer ICC definition.
> How many people died in Abu Ghraib..
at least one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Jamadi
> How many innocent lives were put at risk because of Abu Ghraib?
Depends on how you define innocent, but given WMD was a false pretence, and regime change the moral justification retreat position, torture and prisoner abuse at the same site as the former regime is pretty damning. I would say a lot of lives were put at risk by this change in 'optics'.
> let's get outraged about the Taliban..
No problem.
> By the way, the guys in Abu were fighting..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Jamadi was a suspect, not a combatant.
> One specific and direct result of Manning is the case of Shakil Afridi
There's absolutely nothing specific or direct about Manning and this, the link you provide makes no such suggestion.
> There are dozens and dozens of intelligence sources and relationships that were significantly harmed because of Manning.
This was not to the case according to military testimony: http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/07/31/59869.htm http://www.thenation.com/blog/174622/seven-myths-about-bradl... (see number five.)
EDIT: I misread, thinking you meant injured or killed. It just hurt relationships, I think that point is fairly hard to argue. Sure, it hurt relationships. I'd say Abu Ghraib looms larger in their consciousness than the leaks that took place though.
> Being morally outraged over Bradley Manning puts you in the same shoes as a Taliban sympathizer because not only was Manning a soldier
Echoes of GWB: you are either with us or against us. Most people have the maturity to rise above this simplistic level of thinking.
further to what I wrote above:
On April 20, 2004 insurgents fired forty (40) mortar rounds into the prison. Twenty-two detainees were killed and 92 wounded. Commentators thought the attack was either as an attempt to incite a riot or retribution for detainees' cooperating with the United States.[6]
reasonable to surmise shelling was to stop or prevent information being given up under torture.
If the police have a duty of care to witnesses, and the Mafia kill them, then the police should take some blame. Not as much as the mafia. Think of a witness protection program, if they fail at their task then they are partially to blame.
So no, I am not trying to paint it all as being US' fault, you can tell that because I wrote "insurgents fired".
> How many innocent lives were put at risk because of Abu Ghraib?
Depends on how you define innocent
Right, then, so you're fine with me murdering you as long as I don't torture you first? Better than the worst is not good enough.
"Manning's releases however put dozens of people directly in the line of fire."
Everyone keeps saying this. Can you explain how it is that the Army and the Obama administration, who have unparalleled interest in seeing Manning discredited and have gone to great lengths to do so, have so far failed to uncover a single instance of Manning's releases actually harming a human being?
I cannot find such a link.
update: fixed typo.
Manning joined the Army in late 2007/early 2008, by which time the US had been involved in what a lot of people (including myself) consider to have been an illegal war in Iraq for 4-5 years; one in which the existence of appalling human rights abuses such as torture and extraordinary rendition were well documented, and which by then was well understood by the public to have been predicated on faulty intelligence.
It seems to me that if you have a negative view of war and militarism, then you should probably not join the organization involved in fighting that war in the first place. You could serve your country perfectly well and without taking part in military aggression by, say, joining the Coast Guard.
Frankly, I think the only reason Manning has hero status on HN is because he was a computer nerd, and so other computer nerds are willing to suspend their critical faculties because they can identify with him. I can identify with him up to a point, but not to the point of wanting to join the army 5 years into a clusterfuck like the Iraq war run by an administration that had tossed things like the Geneva convention out the window.
Information about Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was revealed in 2004 by the Department of Defense itself pursuant to its own investigation. Information about waterboarding (which as far as I am concerned is illegal torture) was widely available and the subject of intense public discussion in 2007, before Manning even joined the army.
So if they witness a crime, they should speak out. Manning did release evidence of several crimes leading up to and during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:
The cheerful murder of Reuters journalists and later innocents who came to help by that helicopter crew
The purchase of child prostitutes for entertainment by Dyncorp
The illegal collection of DNA from UN officials and representatives (straight from Dr. Strangelove!)
etc.
Now as you say he also released a lot of other material, which wasn't directly related to any crime, so he should expect to be punished for that indiscriminate release, and it weakens his case, but I'd also expect some clemency given that the release was clearly in the public interest and revealed many unlawful orders and coverups.
I don't think he deserves 35 years for that, compared to the 6 months sentence of Sgt. Sabrina Harman who tortured and abused detainees, it seems disproportionate.
In the first "crime"... No crime was committed nor was anyone ever convicted. It was a tragic result, but not one that the reporters could have mitigated the risk.
At the very least Reuters should have been provided with this footage (instead it was covered up), and an independent investigation held.
The chain of command issuing the unlawful orders and participating in the coverups is unlikely to agree that revealing those things is in the "public interest".
Which is kind of the fundamental problems that whistleblowers always face (whether or not formal protections are in place) -- the people deciding whether or not to punish them (or whether or not the protections apply) are often the people on whom they are "blowing the whistle", or at least people with shared interest with the targets of the whistleblowing.
This is mitigated when there is involvement of an independent actor in the process, but in the case of military trials that are completely within the military chain of command within the executive branch, that kind of independence is hard to find.
In the actual military the untoward influence (real or perceived) of the convening officer on the outcome of the case is a B.F.D., just witness all the sexual assault/harassment cases that were being upended by Obama's condemnation of servicemembers who engage in them. In fact SECDEF himself had to issue a memo saying, in effect, that the POTUS expects trial members/judges to use their own independent judgment when considering the facts of a case, just as specified in the M.C.M.
You're right that an independent actor is what is needed in general, but Col. Lind does not report to the President on this, she reports to the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, which is a completely separate chain of command from the one that was issuing orders relating actions in Iraq of Afghanistan.
Passing the laws is not being part of the process of applying them (its also inaccurate to say that the UCMJ is "set out by Congress, not the President", since the current version of the UCMJ wasn't adopted over a Presidential veto.)
> Likewise the trials are overseen in the end by the civilian Supreme Court.
Which, given the length (both procedurally and temporally) of the appeal chain is a far more distant involvement of a non-executive actor than is the case in civilian trials.
> You're right that an independent actor is what is needed in general, but Col. Lind does not report to the President on this, she reports to the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington
The existence of intervening steps on the chain of command does not make a military officer independent of the Commander-in-Chief.
That's first. Obeying lawful orders is second.
It's debatable how this oath applies in Manning's case, but I think it's rather telling what order the things you are swearing to uphold come in.
When I was in the military my interpretation was that anything I was ordered to do that was contrary to the Constitution was an unlawful order. If I were taking the oath seriously, that would have required active dissent, not just ignoring the order.
http://usmilitary.about.com/od/joiningthemilitary/a/oathofen...
Did Manning reveal anything that was prima facie unconstitutional?
If not for things like PRISM the military and other branches of the Government wouldn't need to worry about soldiers/their employees reporting unconstitutional actions of the Government. Because it seems they break the law all the time, yes, that's a problem. The Governments problem not whistleblowers.
Manning probably assumed that there must be some illegal stuff in the cables/documentation he revealed. And some documents show he was right.
So, the USG, similarly to Adam from my example has worked long and hard for its reputation. Don't blame some teachers/whistleblowers for suspecting usual suspects.
You are confusing wrongdoers here. All the wars are unconstitutional to begin with because Congress didn't declare them.
From their site (http://oathkeepers.org):
Oath Keepers is a non-partisan association of current and formerly serving military, reserves, National Guard, veterans, Peace Officers, and Fire Fighters who will fulfill the Oath we swore, with the support of like minded citizens who take an Oath to stand with us, to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, so help us God. Our Oath is to the Constitution.
Manning broke the law to reveal an indiscriminate collection of State Department cables.
However they are trained that the presumption is that a given order is lawful unless it's clearly contrary to the Constitution, law, regulation or policy.
As we phrase it in the Navy, no sailor has ever been court-martialed for following a legitimate order, but the same cannot be said regarding mutiny.
In short if you want to challenge an order go right ahead, but realize that your ass is going to be put on the line and even the Supreme Court will be biased on the military's side regarding it, if previous experience is any judge.
What you should say is,
"They will be prosecuted if they unilaterally decide to violate a lawful order, even if they think it is better for humanity at large."
And I would add, "And sometimes duty to humanity will compel them to accept that they will be prosecuted, and they have to unilaterally decide what is right."
Adrian Lamo
No, we call it a mutiny.
A coup is specifically when the action they take involves displacing the lawful government, not merely disobeying its orders.
There's a pretty giant difference.
But much like a court of law, the presumption is that the order is lawful if given by proper authority, and the servicemember must then prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the order is unlawful, and be willing to take the risk of court-martial if they are wrong.
It also somewhat depends on the community you're in. Enlisted nuclear technicians on submarines probably disobey an order every other day at least, to keep an EOOW (or ENG) from doing something stupid to their nuclear propulsion plant.
It seems people are quick to point out that Manning broke some rules, but are too narrow-minded to look up and see the big picture. Manning undeniably made a service to the greater good, which is the good of his country. Whether he broke some rules internal to his organization should not even have come into play in this trial.
No it's not. The stubborn application of the law is called "rule of law" and it's the foundation of the political theory coming out of Enlightenment liberalism. Authoritarian governments are characterized by personalistic/charismatic rule, and the use of fiat/decree in the place of pre-existing legal standards.
Bradley Manning knowingly violated a long-standing law in the military code of justice that he was fully aware of since signing up. Applying the law to Manning is an example of rule of law not authoritarianism.
That is super stupid. You don't understand authoritarianism, then, citations of Wikipedia aside. You do a disservice to the actual victims of authoritarianism.
EDIT: Look at the downvoting.. and this is nice compared to what I wrote at first. Since I'm already -3, I'll remove the politeness filters and say that this comment is idiotic. Stubborn application of the law is authoritarianism? How is that not the dumbest thing written on the internet today. Perhaps I'm the stupid one for believing that WORDS have MEANINGS beyond what is convenient at the moment. It's like people saying that food stamps are socialism. It's not opinion, it's INCORRECT.
All of my examples are universally considered extremely immoral. However, there are also some countries that are mostly authoritarian, but are arguably not immoral (some middle eastern sultanates come to mind). There is an enormous body of though on the morality of laws. This starts in Greek time with Plato and The Republic, and has had contributions from Aquinas, Hobbes, and more recently MLK. A non-authoritarian state can easily pass immoral laws, too.
Finally, the degree of enforcement of law is a concept which I consider separate from the system of government and the particular laws of the society.
So my objection is that the post commingled three separate ideas: the origin of law within a society, the morality of law, and the rigor of law enforcement. I think the commingling was incorrect. I think some of this is so obvious that not recognizing it can be fairly characterized as stupid. Hope that I hope that clarifies things.
To offer my opinion, the US is not close to being an authoritarian state. However, it has some immoral laws. That can be rectified via a democratic process. I think the enforcement of those laws in this case was actually fairly lax, because he clearly committed crimes and it would not have been difficult to have made a case for treason which would have been eligible for capital punishment, as another commenter noted.
So the question shouldn't be "why hasn't the democratic process rectified bad laws", but rather "is there a better process than the democratic process for rectifying bad laws"? I know this sounds like Churchill, but it's also a bit of Gödel if you think about it.
Funny. That is exactly the point this "retarded" commment is making.
That's slightly more serious than the secrets Manning leaked. And by "slightly" I mean "an unguessable number of orders of magnitude."
They only executed those officers for which they could prove this was the case, which is why only a few dozen were executed.
When people talk about the decline of HN, I think it's this sort of information-free, pointlessly contrary posts that they talk about.
If you have a valid point, why do you need to resort to incivility?
> The Japanese were willing to commit to total war to defend their right to massacre Chinese people; the USA took them up on the offer. The only significant debate about the A-Bomb is whether it was more or less deadly than an invasion of mainland Japan.
So you actually think that intentionally killing civilians to win a war is morally okay? I just don't hold that view.
Even if the civilian deaths attributed to the A-bomb where less than that of a supposed land invasion?.
WW2 saw lots of that. Think of the bombing of Dresden when the Allies whipped out the city with incendiary bombs because it was a mayor city factory (ammo, etc.).
Either way by your logic firebombing attacks such as at Dresden or Tokyo would have been just fine (oh no, my bomb had to have hit a barracks, not a hospital!) even though they can't possibly all have been right. So it's not even true to say that conventional bombing wouldn't have killed civilians; every pilot who went on a bombing mission, conventional or nuclear, knew that they were killing civilians too.
And both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had actual military value, it's not as if either of them were resort villages. If the Japanese decide to put tons of civilian structure in between the military establishments then that's on them. Conventional bombing was so inaccurate that practically the only thing you'd be sure to hit while trying to bomb a military target is everything around it.... including the civilian establishments.
My point here was never that other war atrocities are somehow good. It's just my belief that intentionally killing unarmed civilians is murder, in a moral sense, irrespective of circumstance or nationality. If you must take out a military target and there are civilian casualties, then so be it, provided you did your best to minimize them. However, sprinkling some leaflets before dropping an atomic bomb is not doing your best to minimize casualties.
If a display of nuclear power as a deterrent was truly required to end the war, and it may well have been, I can think of numerous less deadly steps that could have been taken first. An aggressive warning strategy that comes to mind would be bombing the remote and relatively unpopulated mountainous regions of Japan.
As a first strike, you mean? No, we have far more effective conventional military weapons that would obviate the need for the overkill that a nuclear strike would deliver.
They didn't have that in WWII though, which is the discussion everyone focuses on, and people always seem to conveniently ignore that the only thing stopping further American and Japanese bloodshed was ending the war ASAP.
To the extent that the A-bombs allowed to the Emperor to save face while still surrendering, those A-bombs saved untold hundreds of thousands or even millions of further Japanese lives, not to mention the cost in American (and Soviet!) casualties.
They surrendered because of Stalin and his unending and brutal (and brutalised, the Red Army was not a happy place) cannon-fodder, not the bomb.
Nuking two civilian populations was unnecessary, barbaric, and inexcusable, and I'm afraid to say pointless.
A fourth grade history student would know exactly what you say. A heavily read historian would say something quite different - or agree. It's pretty divisive, but outside of the US the majority agree that the USSR caused the surrender.
Here's a pretty decent source on the topic - have only skimmed it, after writing this and wanting to back up my statements, but it's pretty balanced. http://www.japanfocus.org/-Tsuyoshi-Hasegawa/2501
People say this a lot, but no one has clearly explained how the U.S.S.R. would have been able to stage an invasion of the Home Islands of Japan. It's not a matter of simply ferrying a bunch of people over the Trans-Siberian railroad, you also need a navy, sufficient air cover (which if I remember my geography correctly would have almost necessarily meant carrier-borne aircraft), and the logistics to back that all up. Japan knew this just as much then as we realize it now.
The Soviet gains after their entry into the war were in China and Korea, not in Japan itself. Their entrance into the war was earlier than expected on the Japanese's part, but they knew the U.S.S.R. would declare war (seriously, you may consider their senior and military leadership stupid, but that stupid?).
Likewise the attack on the Kwantung Army in China was surprising in that it came from every direction possible instead of the one direction they expected it from. But they knew the Soviets would attack, and in fact the attack fell while the Kwantung Army was changing positions to better guard the direction they believed the attack would actually come from.
So certainly the Soviet attack came as a shock, but it was militarily no more severe than any other setback to the Allies.
> but outside of the US the majority agree that the USSR caused the surrender.
Don't take this the wrong way, but what does an opinion poll have to do with whether some event actually happened in a given way or not? It either did or did not happen for the causes described. If the rest of the world has better evidence for their belief then point to the evidence, but don't point to an opinion poll as prima facie evidence of something.
In the event we have evidence on the Japanese side that the atomic bomb proved a useful "excuse" to permit the Emperor to surrender. The Japanese were clearly ready to fight to the death (just witness the Battle of Okinawa), and that applied just as much against the Red Army as it did against the Americans. So simply changing the uniform of the person holding the rifle wouldn't have significantly affected the strategic calculus when the Emperor had to explain his decision to his people.
On the other hand, the atomic bomb was this technological doomsday device that even the most hardened Japanese militant couldn't speak against. You couldn't fight it in the battlefield; you couldn't simply hunker down like a brave citizen and start picking up pieces after the bombs had been dropped, now there were no pieces left to pick up at all.
Japan had nothing like it, and as such it gave the Emperor a clear line of reasoning for why he had to (had to) surrender for the sake of his people. It was something completely different and from out of this world, as opposed to a simple Soviet declaration of war.
Well, whatever the actual reason for the surrender, any claims about it one way or the other are totally unfalsifiable. But, thanks for the historical analysis here nonetheless.
Fair enough. But the people with the best understanding of events as they were happening, were those actually making the decisions at the time.... and they decided to drop the bomb.
For years after that it's been 'backseat drivers' second-guessing that decision despite their own claims being totally unfalsifiable. While it might be nice to be able to look back on hindsight, no one had a crystal ball at the time, which is why it's inappropriate to pin decisions made in 1945 with the moral qualms of a generation that has never seen world-wide total war.
We don't know if there could have been an alternative that definitively ended the war and cost less lives. Things were winding down at that point anyway. I don't even necessarily feel that dropping those bombs was a bad thing in the grand scheme of things, because it shone a light on the darkness that we are capable of as a species. Maybe those two bombs were all that prevented mutual destruction during the cold war.
But as an isolated event, nuking a city is just as horrific as pushing people into ovens - it's really quite comparable, actually - and I think it's best just to say, we did something awful, we thought we had to, it's over now, it won't happen again. Germany did this, for instance. And the only reason that didn't happen for the atomic bombs is because the US "won" the war.
The first says, we did something bad, but it was justified, i.e. we didn't do anything morally wrong. The second says we did something bad, we thought it was justified, but it turns out that it was a mistake. Einstein is clearly expressing the latter, whereas official American policy expresses the former, and there has never been an apology.
Presumably you have a proposed option to have done that without atomic weaponry and that the Americans should have recognized with the information available to them; what is that option?
Instead you get "we did what we had to", which is unapologetic, and doesn't allow the possibility of there being better options. It basically comes down to admitting doubt vs. reinforcing belief (since asserting an unfalsifiable claim is a belief).
Nevertheless, I'm not convinced that invading Japan was the only alternative. I mentioned somewhere, perhaps not in reply to you, that dropping atomic bombs on remote regions of Japan would have demonstrated military superiority with far less casualties.
And another post in this thread linked to this article:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_di...
If you're actually really interested in this, and maybe you are since you're obviously interested in military stuff, I'm pretty sure there are entire bookcases filled with books and journal articles weighing the pros and cons of the decision to drop the bomb.
But there's a difference between loss of life in combat versus deliberate murder of noncombatants outside of a combat situation or of prisoners who are in your care. It's not about who has the highest scorecard of death and depravity.
Ask the same question about incendiary bombing, which happened throughout the war. The B-29s dropping incendiaries on Tokyo killed more people than the atomic attacks. Are those pilots war criminals? Are the artillerymen who leveled towns and villages full of people war criminals? Based on the "total war" approach embraced in WW2, they were not.
I mean, it was essentially, "We have unlimited capacity to randomly murder 100,000 of your civilians at once, we've demonstrated it twice now, so submit to our authority." Well, they did.
FYI I'm not personally advocating that obliterating cities is ok. I find it morally repugnant. I'm Just recounting the generally accepted standard of the time.
Also doing it Charlie Sheen style helps (winning!)
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Moral of this story: Don't join the military for any reason whatsoever. And if you are drafted in, claim on your defense: "I would have been executed otherwise"
The immoral act starts when you volunteer to join the gang that commits it.
I just met a guy who lost his legs to an IED that he KNEW was on the route he was ordered to take because they needed to get from A to B in the quickest possible time. He volunteered to go himself (he was the Captain of the platoon) but his team refused to let him make the run himself.
That was the THIRD IED he was hit by.
I'm glad we have people who are willing to risk their lives for us, no questions asked. They willingly go into hellish situations where they could lose life and limb and with little expectation of reward. Frequently the opposite.
You benefit from this sacrifice. You PROFIT from it. Don't pretend you're morally superior. Police go out and beat up bad guys so you can be safe.
If you were more of a man, you'd admit your cowardice and stay quiet otherwise.
Don't act like the people joining the military do it for some high flying idea of honor and defense of the country. They join in droves because they get to have an adventure with the feeling of danger but extremely low chance of injury. If we were actually fighting a real enemy that really could do us harm, I /might/ call that bravery.
You have an antiquated view of what it is to be "more of a man". You seem to be stuck in the past where blindly killing the others is somehow a good thing without stopping to think about the reasons. How about, why was your friend walking around in a foreign country in the first place?
I like how you couldn't try making your point with a reasoned argument, you had to use ad hominem. Classy.
Taking the high ground on soldiers just following orders in the context of WWII is bizarre. American soldiers killed a startling number of german soldiers and citizens during the post-war occupation. I imagine those American soldiers were just following orders too. The only reason the German and Japanese soldiers were demonized for following orders instead of the American soldiers is the fact we won and they lost. Morals are decided by the victor.
I hardly think pitchforking live babies into cauldrons of boiling water (as during the Rape of Nanking) is "just following orders".
in the civil justice system there are laws. if you break them, you get punished. some of them have special rules around them. take murder. kill someone, go to jail. but if it was self defence, you might walk. easy, right?
in the military justice system, leaking classified docs is a punishable offence. there is no way around this. there is no self defence, etc alternate way. you break the rule, you get court martialed. morals, ethics do not come into play here.
as a soldier, your interpretation of your oath does not apply here. it would when refusing orders like "kill those civilians over there", but only maybe and not in the way you'd like. again, military justice is not following the same framwork of rules and ethics you're used to as a civilian.
the armed forces in itself are not a democracy. they are a special area of society that exist to provide the ability to kill other humans. in order to do so anything civilian quickly goes out the window. the rules exist to enforce the most optimal sytem to maintain a killing force, not the well being of the individual within the organization.
if you don't like that, you should campaign for complete disarmament and the complete disassemblement of the armed forces. there is no half-way, grey area. once you have an army, it exists to kill humans, with all the consequences. the hero whorship present in the US around any soldier seems to imply that the US society has forgotten this (and then is surprised once something like the sentencing of Manning happens).
Nuremberg does not apply at all here. German officers were tried by the Allied Forces, not their own Army. This was the victors cleaning up. The US has not joined the International Criminal Court for similar reasons, to prevent other nations prosecuting its officers and soldiers (for war crimes, etc.). If you want to do so, you'll need to invade the US and be the victor. Note that Saddam was tried and sentenced by an Iraqi court, not an international tribunal even though US soldiers caught him.
It's not like the us military has had some unchanging set of rules. Throughout the last 50 years public ethics policy has vastly changed how the military functions and will continue to do so.
The armed forces may not be a democracy but they exist by the grace of our democracy.
The rules against releasing classified information are in no way arbitrary and have been long-standing parts of military and foreign affairs since their inception. There has been no time when releasing an indiscriminate cache of State Department cables would have ever been considered a legal gray area. (Indeed, the confidentiality of diplomatic communication has been a norm that has existed for thousands of years: http://isanet.ccit.arizona.edu/noarchive/jonsson.htm). Manning very clearly broke the law and could not have failed to know that he was breaking the law.
policy has changed in regards to gays and females in the military, yes. but where exactly has there been policy impact when it comes to the ones of the receiving end of the military force? the US bombs people all over the world, all the time, women, children, no problemo. not a US citizen, no rights at all.
hypocrisy. "the grace of your democracy guides the US Armed Forces". HORSESHIT.
Although uncivil, it was not entirely unwarranted.
It must be possible to understand that what Manning did was both the right thing to do and a clear violation of the armed forces code he agreed to uphold. Unlike civilian law, the armed forces must place a premium on obedience. People volunteer for and agree to these rules, so the outrage isn't as warranted.
Nobody here, as far as I can understand, is actually questioning that the UCMJ had jurisdiction so while your understanding there is appreciated, it was never really in question...
The issue is a conflation of legality and morality. Conflating the two, then asserting that civilians may not understand and are unequipped to discuss the two separately, is toxic to discussion and society as a whole. It is an attempt to remove civilians from the discussion, a discussion that they absolutely must be apart of.
As much as some people may wish it, this ain't Starship Troopers.
It's a little obnoxious to be accused of conflating things one has explicitly separated, but I suppose on this topic those that are outraged are mainly here to vent rather than discuss, and there's nothing wrong with that, so I think I'll bow out here.
In an immoral legal system, justice is fleeting. He is accusing them of, not 'not existing', nor being incorrect, but rather of rendering a verdict that deserves no respect.
That's how I read it anyway.
Edit: His (much later) comment here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6251625) indicates to me that he understands this situation just fine. "I'm not disputing that Manning broke the laws of the military.... ...I don't see how you can defend the laws and regulations of an organization...."
The function of civil authority, say a moral President, something I hope to live to see, would be to pardon Manning, overruling the military justice sentence in the context of a greater good.
Clearly, this will not happen. Obama will simply wash his hands - not explicitly, though. The media will never even ask the question.
..but the more extreme "It TAKES a civilian mind to understand the difference between right and wrong" is also true? If the military is unable to consider morality itself, then we must rely on civilians to call them out. Accusing civilians of being incapable of doing that then puts the military above any sense of morality. Disturbing, to say the least.
That is what he was doing (see for clarification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6251625(, and that is why a reply of "civilians may not understand" got a strongly negative response.
While I'm at it, we need to drop this tired tactic of insinuating that strong disagreement is censorship. I have never suggested that anyone shouldn't be allowed to disagree with me, so, no, it's not ironic in the slightest.
but perfectly fine with strong language in internet forum posts, it is a consequence free area.
“The Whistleblower Protection Act does not apply to the intelligence community. They’re exempt from it. And most people in the intelligence community don’t realize that. So, you can’t even go to the Office of Special Counsel because they’re exempt from that, too, and the merit system protection board. So even if you use the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, the only thing that gives you is the right to go to Congress. It doesn’t–it doesn’t have any teeth there to protect you against retribution from the agency that you’re reporting abuse on.”
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/52174294/t/whistleblower-protectio...
What these people have been exposing isn't wrong according to the internal rules of the NSA/military/State Department/etc., therefore, there's no possibility of achieving change through internal whistleblowing.
After all, give me the toughest of the toughest, 3 years sleeping naked and being woken up every 2 hours to a loud music and put me behind closed door, and I will make him swear and admit he went back in time and killed Jesus Christ himself.
However, there is something my grandfather, an Air Force crypto guy, used to say: "... Have a fair trial and then hang the guilty SOB." To me, this always came off as blind obedience and "kangaroo court" justice.
It should not be what society wants though. I think that has been made painfully clear in the past, but some people still just don't seem to get it.
I find it hard to believe than anyone except for a small minority actually believes that to be the case. If it were, vast partisanship wouldn't exist, since whoever was in power would be considered to "share their best interests".
When is it okay to break the loyalty for the greater good?
Absolutely not. But you don't have to shout every secret you have access to (relevant or not) from the loudest possible podium either.
It's now, according to the actions of these justice systems, worse to expose secrets about crimes than to commit actual crimes. The simplest way of interpreting this is that these crimes are not viewed as crimes at all. But blowing the whistle is.
(edited for clarity)
Maybe that's why he only got 35 years. More importantly, what unconstitutional thing did he release?
But really, that argument is basically saying that collateral damage is acceptable. Innocents can be destroyed if you kill just one guilty party.
> worse to expose secrets about crimes than to commit actual crimes.
Well no, he committed actual crimes that lead to actual suffering and death by intelligence agents.
Nor the Pfc. who leaked details of a heinous rape/murder/arson committed by U.S. troops in Iraq.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Code_of_Military_Justic... matters like absence without leave, contempt towards officials, etc have no place in the civilian justice system.
if you don't like this, you'll need to change the US constitution. "The Congress shall have Power... To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval forces."
Just like the rules they're putting on paper regarding civilians nowadays.
So, uhm, I don't think its right. I think it's following the paper. It's lawful, it's expected, etc. But it's not "right".
Where is the code of conduct when the torturers of Abu ghraib went scott free.
Where is the code of conduct when the people who engineered a war and tore apart two countries went scott free
Where is the code of conduct when the current President orders remote drone strikes against countries when there has been no declaration of war.
No matter how you spin it, this is 'not the armed forces code of conduct'
For you to allege it is, is to dis-honor the men and women who serve in the us military.
Those would be covered by international war crimes cases, something to which the United States of America will never submit. Alternatively, they could also be addressed by a moral President - unfortunately, Obama decided we should just all move on and ignore the war crimes committed in our name.
FWIW in most contries soldiers are fodder for other purposes beyond fighting wars, sometimes are subjects in scientific studies that border on eugenics crap that everyone knows of.
For what I would say - friends don't let friends join an Army.
The Soldiers know what they sign up for, and if you've never been scared for your life in a combat zone, I'd argue that you lack the perspective to that claim.
If a Soldier doesn't feel comfortable with their mission, they have many ways of dealing with it that do not involve being gagged by their superiors.
I don't understand what kind of experiment that could be, unless they're forcing specific couples to have children.
Are you sure you're using the word eugenics right? You're not just trying to say 'nazi' without using the word 'nazi', surely?
It seems perfectly reasonable to call that "[a] scientific stud[y] that border[s] on eugenics".
I don't really buy it. I think the army would want test data for all races. Contaminated agent orange for people of all colors.
Whistleblowing always, by definition, includes breaking some law or contract to expose secret information (otherwise it would be public and already known). Since exposing alleged misconduct is a good for the society, someone should not face any penalty for doing so.
Also, whistleblowing doesn't always include breaking a law or contract. Also, he also exposed things that WEREN'T wrongdoing, and even the "wrong" things he "exposed" were pretty much already known and "wrong" is VERY subjective in this circumstance. The "wrongdoing" was not in what happened in the video, nor the number of civilian casualties, those are accidents and mistakes, but in the misrepresentation of those events. That is not really in and of itself wrong.)
And really, the thing that got him most in trouble were the hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables that exposed no wrongdoing but still exposed state secrets.
You've clearly not read the cables. they were responsible for at least two revolutions [1][2], and we're still learning from them.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/13/amnesty-interna...
[2] http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/wikihistory-did-l...
And either way I wouldn't be so quick to claim that inciting those revolutions is on the balance a positive thing for either Manning or Wikileaks, for the same reason that toppling Saddam's despotic regime was not (on the balance) a good thing.
There is a reason Snowden was very careful to point out in his first public interview that he'd been very selective about what he chose to release and that he wasn't just mass dumping information like Manning did.
now that you mentioned it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_United_States_Fight...
....
b. Your obligations as a U.S. citizen and a member of the armed forces result from the traditional values that underlie the American experience as a nation. These values are best expressed in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, which you have sworn to uphold and defend. You would have these obligations—our country, your service and unit and your fellow Americans—even if the Code of Conduct had never been formulated as a high standard of general behavior.
...
Oh, wait, unless the laws happen to constrain the interrogation techniques used against detainees. Or if they prevent access to the private lives of American citizens. Or if they protect whistleblowers. Or if they get in the way of fighting terrorism in any other way.
But aside from that minor footnote of an afterthought, the law is the law, so we all need to just shut up and accept it.
Maybe that makes sense if the only relevant is between the Armed Forces and Manning. But here's the thing: civilians are the ones paying for the military.
The most worrisome aspect to me is that the administration does not appear to be remotely open to pardoning either Manning or Snowden, while at the same time ignoring the abuses each revealed.
Before this happened, I would have expected the response to be more measured and would have expected there to be some kind of review/investigation of the crimes revealed by the leaks in tandem with attempts to punish the whistleblower... then later after the investigation a possible pardon.
That we are not seeing this happen makes me wonder if I am wrong about the degree to which we have the rule of law in the US.
Obama should do it now, but I will be fine if he waits, just as long as he does it. Until then Manning's incarceration will serve as a focal point to the dishonesty that pervades our government.
And Snowden is actually in the same boat here. He's not military, but he had clearance, so he's liable for quite a bit. I'm not sure which court would trial him, so there might be some differences.
In terms of usable adult life, he's had around a decade at most. And the last 15 years are kinda crappy anyway. If you look at things that way, then it's questionable whether this is any kinder than just putting him up against a wall and getting it over with.
Now, if you said that 35 isn't half a lifetime, and that he'll be about 60 when he gets out, how doesn't that minimize the focus on the effect those 35 years of incarceration actually have on Manning? Were you just so insensitive an engineer that you felt the cold, literal correction was somehow benefiting the conversation?
I think that exaggeration of the effect of Manning's leaks is what led to the overly harsh sentence in the first place. The least we could do in discussing it is not make the same mistake.
I think Manning's sentence is much too long. But at the same time, I don't think misrepresenting how harsh it is does any side of the argument any good. I'm sensitive enough to realize that if we want reasonable sentences, we will have to be honest about how harsh a sentence really is. I can also predict that critics will write us off as irrational or whiny if we make a habit of overreacting every time something happens we don't like.
I'm not insensitive. On the contrary, I can imagine much worse sentences that could have been handed down, up to and including capital punishment for treason. As crushing as the final sentence must be to Manning and those near him, I can also understand the coping mechanisms they will resort to to deal with it. One of those is that the sentence is not as bad as it could have been.
>35 isn't even half a lifetime. He was born in 1987 (geez, he's younger than I am)
How is this not minimizing the severity again? At the very least it's more than half his remaining lifetime, and possibly all of his remaining lifetime. He also gets to miss out on pretty much any chance at having a family. His only friends will be other convicts. I hope he at least manages to get out on parole, but there is certainly a chance he doesn't.
Also, the point I was originally making, is that for most people the quality of life between 25-60 is far higher than the quality of life from 60-95. Even if he does happen to live to 95 and it's "only half", most people are going to enjoy age 35 more than they are going to enjoy age 95.
Being in the military is different than NOT being in the military.
But I agree with your overall point. He's subject to civilian law and the UCMJ.
Anyway, I'm personally glad that the military has finally prosecuted him and that he can get on with his life after serving his time.
#
Personally, I think there's only room for one law in a country. The minute you start splitting off separate courts for special interests, in which civilian juries can't intervene, you make a mockery of the idea of civilian control - separate it too far from the issues for it to be meaningfully applied.
That is a demonstrably false statement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
Manning was either guilty of not guilty of the things he was charged with, and that is independent of what some General says to Congress. If the system does not ensure equal justice then the system should be fixed, but that would not change anything relating to Manning's actions and the consequences of those actions.
You'd think with as many web devs as we have on HN that more people would understand stateless protocols and independent transactions.
"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" often put people into paradoxes where they were required by one set of rules to not disclose their sexuality while another set of circumstances + rules required them to disclose it (ie., not lie), or face penalties.
I'll change the topic a bit.
For one good Snowden there are ten bad types like Gordon Gekko or Francis Underwood.
I just wonder what bad types do with the data NSA has.
The ultimate consequence of which is that even defining war-crimes is pointless since there would be no way to legally present evidence.
He could be out in 8 or 9 years. Not that harsh.
I don't expect it will happen and even if it does, I don't see 12 years in prison as a light sentence.
Something wrong with the morals of the people in the uniforms nowadays. The Oath is to be taken seriously. If you take an Oath to protect the US Constitution and then are given orders that basically destroy it, you bear the responsibility not to fulfill them and reveal those secret actions to the US public.
What did he reveal that was unconstitutional?
Civilians might not like it or even understand, but Manning hopefully did when he chose to join the Armed Forces.
Snowden is different, just a contractor. But Manning joined the club, broke its rules. Knowingly. Hence a court martial. Not so long ago he would have been executed for it, 35 is a soft ruling.