You cannot look at any statement from him without realizing he's been kept in extremely hostile conditions, just this side of torture, WITHOUT TRIAL for over 1000 days (nearly three years!) being told he's facing execution or life imprisonment.
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.
Probably you should clarify your statement a bit or you'll be downvoted a lot (upvoted you, but that's only one.)
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.
"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.
> 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?
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.
Whistle blower are per se mentally ill, you claim? Or how come, you dismiss him as a fragile person?
He had good intentions and good reasons, the cables are an eye opener. Sweeping and leaving those actions under the rug would be the right thing to do?
indeed, I don't know his biography, but do you?
To paint Manning as a weak, gay, sexually uncertain character suits those parties who'd rather distract from the contents of those leaks than to admit that parts of the US foreign policy are unethical.
I've read a lot about him and those things are pretty much common knowledge by now.
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.
It's definitely not the lowest clearance you can get. The clerk shuffling HR paperwork at an admin office for military technically needs to be screened as well (since they'll be handling PII and responsible for pay system updates), but they certainly don't need access to TS info.
A TS/SCI is required for just about every intel job in the military, so sure it's probably factually accurate to say that's the lowest clearance for an analyst. But it's also the clearance that 95% (an educated estimate) of analysts hold. There just aren't many folks with anything higher than that and comparatively speaking not a whole lot of stuff gets classified higher than that. So, what's your point?
That's just a fundamental misunderstanding of what the clearances mean.
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.
There's a difference between secret from US citizens and restricted from public (I.e. worldwide) disclosure.
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.
You should probably read up a bit on how the cable-gate bits and pieces fit into the Arab spring. The world would definitely not 'be the same without him', maybe your part of the world, but definitely not all of it.
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.
Bringing democracy to Iraq was never a stated goal of any US administration.
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.
> Bringing democracy to Iraq was never a stated goal of any US administration.
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...
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.