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Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#401

Post by mpyne »

zeteo wrote: post #379
briandear wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abu Ghraib a crime against humanity? Yes, that's similar to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. That's nearly exactly the same thing as the genocide in Rwawanda. That's definitely on the same level as Pol Pot. 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 ma…

>You likely have no idea how Americans are treated by the Taliban and Al Q when they're captured [... T]he guys in Abu were fighting on the same side as the guys that beheaded Daniel Pearl. [... I]f 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 Your obsession with terrorists' lack of scruples is…

They didn't say it was OK to humiliate or torture people, so stop drawing your own conclusion on that please. They said it was not morally equivalent to an actual war crime, especially the kind that got people put in the dock at Nürnberg.

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#402

Post by mpyne »

baddox wrote: post #367
rayiner wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hint: you don't really want to hear everything your friends might think of you, much less your frenemies, acquaintances, or coworkers.

But would I get angry at my friend, or the person who told me what my friend secretly thinks of me?

"If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear"

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.

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#403

Post by mpyne »

sarutahiko wrote: post #311
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…

> and jeopardized the lives of people in foreign nations employed by or cooperating with the US. 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?

I'd be interested in seeing such studies, especially the methodology. The Taliban themselves were quite clear that they would be on the hunt for any and all collaborators, and there are eyewitness accounts of foreign service agents who had to be rapidly withdrawn from their post (sometimes in the middle of the night while literally out in a field) due to their name being revealed in these leaks.

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.

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#404

Post by mpyne »

sigzero wrote: post #394
anigbrowl wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Had he stopped at just the video I would be on his side. He didn't. He let loose 700,000 pages of documents that he shouldn't have and didn't need to do. He deserves the jail time.

I'd grant him the information relating to the Granai airstrike as well. But on the other hand he wasn't facing jail time for that anyways; the judge had found him not guilty of that one.

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#405

Post by baddox »

rayiner wrote: post #398
baddox wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find your opinion utterly bizarre.

Are you married? Do you tell your wife every thing you think of her all the time?

I'm not married, but I doubt that I would tell her everything. That's not what I have an issue with. My issue is with the idea that society is some brittle construct that's reliant on honesty, and especially the idea that you would be angry at the person who leaked a secret rather than the person holding the secret.

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#406

Post by mpyne »

dragonwriter wrote: post #358
grey-area wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in the military have the right, and legal duty, to refuse unlawful orders, including orders that violate the international laws of war. 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…

> but I'd also expect some clemency given that the release was clearly in the public interest and revealed many unlawful orders and coverups. 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 p…

The military trials of which you speak deal with military penal code as set out by Congress, not by the President. Likewise the trials are overseen in the end by the civilian Supreme Court.

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.

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#407

Post by venus »

rayiner wrote: post #186
venus wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no, the soldiers in the helicopter should not be tried Oh, I'm sure they won't be. No doubt whatever actions they took are entirely justifiable under whatever legal framework has been whipped up to cover it. Not like there's going to be Nuremberg trials for Iraq. But at the end of the day, the video shows american soldiers in billion-dollar helicopters calmly killing innocent people in a foreign country they have n…

None of these are legal justifications. The law isn't even relevant here, since the conduct happened in a theater of war. The video shows soldiers in helicopters shooting at a group of people, some of whom are armed with AK47s and RPGs, in the midst of a firefight in which their comrade's are getting shot at nearby. In the process they mistakenly hit two reporters who are carrying equipment that reasonably could be m…

> None of these are legal justifications. The law isn't even relevant here, since the conduct happened in a theater of war

You keep on repeating "theater of war! theater of war!" like it's some get out of jail free card giving you carte blanche to do whatever you want, for whatever reasons, without consequence. And I suppose, if you're America, it is.

But this is not some WWI battlefield. It's a city filled with millions of ordinary people living ordinary lives, with every right to live those lives in peace. "Theater of war" or not, if you're going to go and shoot up foreign cities filled with innocent people then maybe the burden of proof should be on you a bit that you kill the "right" people.

Everything you say is founded on a presumption in favour of the military. Their comrades were shot at before! Erring on the side of caution (caution for us, of course)! Hey, that could have been a gun! We didn't know there were kids!

Love to hear what all the bloodthirsty war fans would think if those were innocent americans being calmly cut to pieces by some unfeeling foreign gunner. "What's that you say? It's a theater of war? Oh well that's perfectly all right then! Fire away!"

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#408

Post by dragonwriter »

rayiner wrote: post #186
venus wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no, the soldiers in the helicopter should not be tried Oh, I'm sure they won't be. No doubt whatever actions they took are entirely justifiable under whatever legal framework has been whipped up to cover it. Not like there's going to be Nuremberg trials for Iraq. But at the end of the day, the video shows american soldiers in billion-dollar helicopters calmly killing innocent people in a foreign country they have n…

None of these are legal justifications. The law isn't even relevant here, since the conduct happened in a theater of war. The video shows soldiers in helicopters shooting at a group of people, some of whom are armed with AK47s and RPGs, in the midst of a firefight in which their comrade's are getting shot at nearby. In the process they mistakenly hit two reporters who are carrying equipment that reasonably could be m…

> The law isn't even relevant here, since the conduct happened in a theater of war.

If the law wasn't relevant in theaters of war, we wouldn't have phrases like "war crime".

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#409

Post by mpyne »

tbrownaw wrote: post #254
enoch_r wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in the military have the right, and legal duty, to refuse unlawful orders, including orders that violate the international laws of war. 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 o…

Doesn't it seem a bit dumb to require them to refuse unlawful orders, but also forbid them from determining for themselves what is "unlawful" so they have to rely on their superiors (who are the ones giving the orders in the first place)? Or they can be stuck with "my government says this order is lawful (and will do bad things to me if I refuse it), the people we're fighting say it's unlawful (and if they win will d…

They are not forbidden from determining that a given order is lawful or not.

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.

Re: Judge sentences Bradley Manning to 35 years

#410

Post by Volpe »

jasonlotito wrote: post #386
CamperBob2 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference however is Abu Ghraib didn't put intelligence sources at risk 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.

> 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 impris…

I don't think you can think of "The Taliban" as a single coherrent group that have a "policy" on torturing american soldiers.

When Abu Ghraib was publicised, a lot of moderate taliban would have become radicalised. That seems rather logical to me.

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