Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years • Hacker News Board

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#321

Post by throwaway9848 » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 6:40 PM UTC

glesica wrote: post #289

throwaway9848 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The stubborn application of law is not justice. It is authoritarianism, which Wikipedia defines as [...]" 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…

It sounds like a totally reasonable definition to me. All you've done is to repeat over and over again that the definition is stupid, without identifying why it is stupid or how it could be improved. That's why you got downvoted, not because of your opinion.

Let's examine typical examples of authoritarianism: Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Franco, to name a few. Note these are people, not nations, yet they they instantaneously identifiable with the USSR, Cambodia, Chile, and Spain. This is a key aspect of authoritarianism - the origin of laws and their enforcement are from a person or cabal, not from the people of that nation. Dictatorship is not synonymous with authoritarianism, but they have a large overlap.

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.

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#322

Post by brown9-2 » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 6:42 PM UTC

zeteo wrote: post #35

>Manning, 25, was convicted last month [...] The government had asked [for] 60 years. “There is value in deterrence, your honor; this court must send a message [...] National security crimes that undermine the entire system must be taken seriously.” This is not the rule of law. It is a government that is increasingly relying on citizen ignorance to secretly make and implement policy, and on savage reprisals to terror…

Isn't a large part of punishments for committing crimes deterrence? I fail to see how that is irrelevant here.

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#323

Post by pinaceae » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 6:50 PM UTC

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #259

jusben1369 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fuck you"?! You do realize you're trying to bully and intimidate someone whose opinion you don't agree with i. (and just happens to be factually correct and fairly balanced in delivery) Kind of ironic I'd say.

One guy posting angry on Hacker News does not constitute bullying or intimidation, and "fuck you" is a fair and balanced response to the suggestion that military personnel are inherently morally superior to civilians. 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 ir…

never claimed superiority, just vast difference. laid out in a subsequent comment.

but perfectly fine with strong language in internet forum posts, it is a consequence free area.

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#324

Post by Zenst » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 7:01 PM UTC

I very much doubt that he will serve the full 35 years, two aspects being that today it is political and down the line mentalities (govermental and people) change, slowly and generaly for the better.

  Think of somebody who was in the German army during WWII and tried to kill Hitler and failed.  In Germany he violeted the law and would be tried and found guilty and punished with more years than Manning.  Manning did not kill or try to kill people and his motivations show no intent of that happening and the opposite in that he was trying to prevent unlawful killing by his actions however right or wrong they were.  In the Allies eye's though somebody trying to kill Hitler during the war would be a hero and prasied and on balance not so many years later even the german army as a whole would agree that it was the right thing to do at the time, even if not judged as such.

So whats the issue, well it is about milatary or goverments keeping secrets that show them going aginst what is moraly right in the peoples eye's in part. This is why such secrets are classified for a time and then released, albiet some redactions refering to other documents that are more sensitive and have a longer release delay imposed upon them. But most makes the surface in your lifetime, Manning in his part experdited some aspects and the one that we all know and remember would be the helicopter shooting the wrong people, sadly we do not know if those people had been under on the build up to that event, that was not released from what I know. They may of been on tripple shifts or just lost a friend in a similiar situation, everybody is different and humans do make mistakes, some wrong, some very wrong and should not be made. But that is another matter

The point I'm trying to highlight is that in say 5 years, 10..15..... would the mentalities of those future times stand by this judgement. Yes it is right to send a message, but over time that message reaches home and people get cases reviewed or paroled, but I just feel he will not serve that full 35 year term, but that wont change tomorrow or soon. If anything the longer this matter and topic is in the news then the longer the time will be that he is released early, that's how I see it.

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#325

Post by pinaceae » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 7:01 PM UTC

math0ne wrote: post #281

pinaceae wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're arguing from an ethical viewpoint, which is fine, but it does not apply to this sentence. i know this is hard, but let me explain. 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…

You make it sound as if life is a video game or something. He broke an arbitrary rule so he must pay the price. This isn't a game, ethics are always at play and we as the public have a duty to make sure our military is acting ethically. 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 t…

if you care that deeply about morals and ethics, you need to be for the complete abandonment of the Armed Forces. which is a classic pacifist position, but it should be clear that there can't be a grey area. you either have an apparatus to kill other human beings (incl. collateral damage) or you don't. insisting on clean war is hypocrisy. insisting on a clean and nice army is hypocrisy - soldiers exist to project force through violence, aka killing human beings.

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.

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#326

Post by veritas20 » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 7:08 PM UTC

cagey wrote: post #221

veritas20 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about if someone revealed the identities of CIA agents? Scooter Libby...remember him? He's chilling somewhere right now as a free man.

Wasn't it Richard Armitage that did that? "He has acknowledged that he publicly released the classified information that Valerie Plame Wilson was a secret agent for the CIA, triggering the Plame Affair, though he has said it was inadvertent."[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Armitage_%28politician...

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/17479718/ns/politics/t/jurors-conv...

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#327

Post by qznc » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 7:12 PM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #80

f1nch3r wrote: post #40

Growing up as a conservative, hyper-patriotic American it pains me to say that I hate my country. A young man exposes wrongdoing by the military and gets sentenced to 35 years in prison while the administration that started an illegal war with Iraq, costing untold American and Iraqi lives, are free.

Don't hate your country. First he leaked a ton of classified military stuff, not just bad or morally questionable things and while his treatment was shameful, the judge did take that into account during sentencing. Finally don't hate your country because it is actually great. In most nations we would never have heard of this because it would be the way things were done, second it was the US that thought the rest of t…

"it was the US that thought the rest of the world the ideas behind freedom"

The US thought the rest of the world how an arrogant world police looks like. The ideas of freedom (aka democracy I assume) mostly originate from europe (greek republic, french revolution, reformation, enlightenment). The american revolution is certainly important, but not the only one. Also, remember that you got some serious help from France in that revolution.

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#328

Post by meepmorp » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 7:14 PM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #314

meepmorp wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 muc…

> These leaks damaged relationships with foreign governments. If truth hurts it's not a good sign.

This comment is so remarkably naive and juvenile, I have to assume it's parody.

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#329

Post by anigbrowl » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 7:15 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #288

zeteo wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 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…

What did manning release that was an actual war crime?

I imagine they'r referring to the video of a helicopter shooting someone in Iraq who turned out to be holding a camera rather than a rocket launcher, which Wikileaks released under the title 'Collateral murder.'

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.

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#330

Post by glesica » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 7:17 PM UTC

throwaway9848 wrote: post #321

glesica wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like a totally reasonable definition to me. All you've done is to repeat over and over again that the definition is stupid, without identifying why it is stupid or how it could be improved. That's why you got downvoted, not because of your opinion.

Let's examine typical examples of authoritarianism: Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Franco, to name a few. Note these are people, not nations, yet they they instantaneously identifiable with the USSR, Cambodia, Chile, and Spain. This is a key aspect of authoritarianism - the origin of laws and their enforcement are from a person or cabal, not from the people of that nation. Dictatorship is not synonymous with authoritaria…

Much more useful. I would point out, however, that many people have begun to wonder whether bad laws can truly be rectified through a democratic process at this point. I am of the opinion that we have, or will soon, hit a sort of tipping point beyond which changing bad laws becomes unfeasible. At that point, aren't we essentially ruled by a cabal of economic and political elites, pushing us into the realm of "authoritarianism"?