Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chelsea Manning confirms health status with attorneys

chelseamanning.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 47 posts

Re: Chelsea Manning confirms health status with attorneys

#31

Post by anonu »

grizzles wrote: post #25
sparky_z wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, it's pretty standard for crimes to have differing punishments depending on whether they were accidental or purposeful. Sometimes they're even considered different crimes entirely (i.e., murder vs manslaughter). (I'm not defending Chelsea's treatment here. I just think it's odd that grizzles has singled out this particular aspect of the situation as worthy of outrage.)

Petraeus did it for sex. He got a fine, and no prison time.

It also ended his career...

Re: Chelsea Manning confirms health status with attorneys

#32

Post by gozur88 »

grizzles wrote: post #25
sparky_z wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, it's pretty standard for crimes to have differing punishments depending on whether they were accidental or purposeful. Sometimes they're even considered different crimes entirely (i.e., murder vs manslaughter). (I'm not defending Chelsea's treatment here. I just think it's odd that grizzles has singled out this particular aspect of the situation as worthy of outrage.)

Petraeus did it for sex. He got a fine, and no prison time.

He also leaked far less data and had an idea of what he was leaking. Manning did far, far more damage to national security interests the law was designed to protect.

Re: Chelsea Manning confirms health status with attorneys

#33

Post by thomasruns »

grizzles wrote: post #15

This really puts the whole Hillary Clinton email scandal into perspective, huh? The message seems to be that if you leak classified data to the American people you get a big punishment, whereas if you leak classified data carelessly (Clinton) or for your girlfriend's book (Petraeus) the most you can expect is a slap on the wrist. That's f ed up.

2 important clarifications: 1) Clinton did not "leak" anything, 2) Her emails did not contain anything that was classified at the time it was sent.

I'm not defending her decisions to use private email servers, but using the phrase "leak classified data" when speaking of her is not accurate.

Re: Chelsea Manning confirms health status with attorneys

#34

Post by gozur88 »

rhizome wrote: post #16
Swizec wrote: post #2

This part seems a little bit ironic "Though she would have preferred to keep her private information private". Is that not why she's come into the public eye? For releasing private information that some people would have preferred to keep private? This isn't a comment on whether her leak was the right thing to do or not, just the whole "Treat others like you want others to treat you".

You're getting plenty of feedback here, but you might want to read up on "category error" as to your sense of the privacy concepts you use.

The problem with this is that Manning released, along with some things you could argue the public has a right to know, all the other data diplomats and spies had collected.

Did we all need to know salacious details about Muammar Gaddafi's "voluptuous" Ukrainian nurse? That seems very much the same kind of data to me.

Re: Chelsea Manning confirms health status with attorneys

#35

Post by pm90 »

rtpg wrote: post #13
themartorana wrote: post #8

Is anyone surprised she's suicidal? Locked in solitary confinement, for a minimum of 8 years (probably a lot more), at the hands of an obviously vindictive government - I imagine that by now I would have tried to kill myself too.

It's still deplorable to me that you can force someone into solitary confinement for anything over a couple of days. Well, a lot of the mechanisms of prison seem pretty counterproductive... 23 hours in the same room. My understanding is that members of the military sign away a bunch of their rights but I don't understand how throwing somebody in jail for 20 years is a thing we came up with.

It came up as a consequence of the criminal justice system. That kind of punishment was meant for people who could not be left by themselves as they posed a very real threat to society: murderers, rapists, arsonists etc. Once the system is in place, its easy to just "add" to it. Making certain things severely punishable (e.g. the prosecution of Aaron Schwartz) just requires the lawmakers to categorize these new crimes in a certain way and not to invent the category itself.

Of course, if you go back further, punishments were invented by the ruling class to keep everyone else in line. The king could pretty much have anyone hanged if he wanted to and it took sometime before there were enough smart people in society to suggest that this was maybe not the best way to live.

Re: Chelsea Manning confirms health status with attorneys

#36

Post by zackelan »

thomasruns wrote: post #33
grizzles wrote: post #15

This really puts the whole Hillary Clinton email scandal into perspective, huh? The message seems to be that if you leak classified data to the American people you get a big punishment, whereas if you leak classified data carelessly (Clinton) or for your girlfriend's book (Petraeus) the most you can expect is a slap on the wrist. That's f ed up.

2 important clarifications: 1) Clinton did not "leak" anything, 2) Her emails did not contain anything that was classified at the time it was sent. I'm not defending her decisions to use private email servers, but using the phrase "leak classified data" when speaking of her is not accurate.

You're right about the "leak" distinction, but the "classified at the time it was sent" question is stickier:

http://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/clintons-handling-of-classi...

> More than 2,000 of the 30,490 emails Clinton turned over to the State Department contained classified information, including 110 emails in 52 email chains that contained classified information at the time they were sent or received. (Most emails were retroactively deemed to contain classified information by the U.S. agencies from which the information originated.)

> Some of the emails containing classified information “bore markings indicating the presence of classified information,” contrary to Clinton’s claims that none was marked classified. Comey did not provide a specific number.

> "Only a very small number of the emails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information," Comey said. "But even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an email, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it."

It's also entirely possible that of the thousands of emails that were not turned over, some of them contained classified information. We know there were a non-zero number of these:

> Among those several thousand work-related emails that were not provided to the State Department, Comey said, "three of those were classified at the time they were sent or received; one at the secret level and two at the confidential level. There were no additional top secret emails found."

Re: Chelsea Manning confirms health status with attorneys

#37

Post by labster »

mhluongo wrote: post #21
foota wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully not too off topic, but I believe the preferred nomenclature is more along the lines of "People who are transgender" (though I could be wrong and would appreciate someone saying so)

"Person-first language" is a thing in special education- I wouldn't be surprised if that were preferred here. The idea behind it is that the adjective isn't the defining attribute of the person.

As a person who is male, I agree.

Re: Chelsea Manning confirms health status with attorneys

#38

Post by zackelan »

rdl wrote: post #7

When you write a letter to someone facing 20+ years more in prison, who has just tried to kill herself, what do you say? I'm kind of at a loss for words -- "hope you get well soon?" "hope you are out of the hospital and back to your, uh, home soon?" https://www.chelseamanning.org/learn-more/write-to-chelsea-m...

The best-case scenario for the people keeping her in prison is that we forget about her, and she spends years there, forgotten by the rest of the world.

The letter I mailed to Chelsea this weekend said "you have not been forgotten". That's it. One sheet of paper and a sharpie. Nothing that could give whoever censors her mail an excuse to throw my letter out.

Her birthday is December 17th. I added a reminder to my calendar to send one each December 1st, to allow for processing time through the prison mail. One stamp and one letter can make a difference in someone's life, and Amnesty International has recommended mailing prisoners on their birthday.

http://blog.amnestyusa.org/asia/on-your-birthday-you-are-not...

Re: Chelsea Manning confirms health status with attorneys

#39

Post by foota »

foota wrote: post #11
ams6110 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transgenders have an alarmingly high suicide rate even without those factors piled on.

Hopefully not too off topic, but I believe the preferred nomenclature is more along the lines of "People who are transgender" (though I could be wrong and would appreciate someone saying so)

You know, thinking about it I wish this were focused on more. I think if more people had this mindset and just remembered that we're all people first we might be kinder and less hateful to one another. Focusing on what we have in common before the small differences that are a part of our identities. There's so much hate of others in the world and it makes me sad.

Re: Chelsea Manning confirms health status with attorneys

#40

Post by exolymph »

foota wrote: post #11
ams6110 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transgenders have an alarmingly high suicide rate even without those factors piled on.

Hopefully not too off topic, but I believe the preferred nomenclature is more along the lines of "People who are transgender" (though I could be wrong and would appreciate someone saying so)

I've seen "trans people" and "transgender people" widely used by trans people, so I generally assume that they are okay.
Post reply on HN