Posted on 01/16/2013 8:49:30 PM PST by Olog-hai
A US military judge ruled Wednesday that Bradley Manning’s motive for allegedly leaking a huge cache of secret files to WikiLeaks is no defense against the long list of charges he faces.
Manning, an army private who was arrested in May 2010 while serving as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, faces trial in June for passing diplomatic cables and war logs to the anti-secrecy website run by Julian Assange.
Manning’s lawyers had argued that evidence should be heard at trial about why the soldier chose to illicitly transmit the confidential documents to WikiLeaks, but the request was largely thrown out. …
The 25-year-old faces life imprisonment if he is convicted of the most serious charge that he “aided the enemy,” that is if he acted in the knowledge the information could eventually be accessed by Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. …
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Didn’t he claim at one time that it was retaliation against the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy?
He is a “hacktivist” member of the lavender mafia. A traitor. His crime is understood by all.
I hope he is happy now.
It’s easy to go after the whistleblower, especially given how the left loves them. But I hate the idea that whatever the gubmint declares secret just is, and they are the final judge. Most of the time it isn’t troop movements or anything that could conceivably hurt us, except in a PR sense. They like to cover their assessed. Then 20 years later they say, “Oh, by the way, you know that Gulf of Tonkin thing? Yeah, we were in their waters, oops...We broke Japanese diplomatic and military codes but didn’t bother telling Kimmel and Short, sorry...the Germans warned us they’d fire on ships carrying munitions, and the Lusitania wasn’t just carrying passengers and was left unprotected...etc.”
I was the exact same MOS as this flamer. He knew going in that ANY release of classified information entrusted to him was punishable by the UCMJ. You can’t be a “whistleblower” in intelligence, it doesn’t work that way, especially with clasified documents. I am still bound by secrecy even though I got out 30 years ago and cannot travel to communist countries without prior permission of the government. If he didn’t like the homosexuality policy of the military at that time, he could’ve either waited until his ETS or went to his first sergeant and said “I’m gay and I want out” and he’d have been a civilian with an honorable discharge and unemployment benefits & GI Bill in less than two weeks. But no, now he’s on trial and will likely do at least 10 years of hard time with a dishonorable discharge to boot. He chose poorly.
LOL!
The little faggot can’t agrue that his snit fit over his boyfriend was the reason he leaked all that classified info.
Oh, woe is him.
He disclosed sources and hundreds of them were killed. A firing squad would be fair.
As they say in intelligence, most of the secret information is obtained from public sources. For example, the traitor published an order of food for a closed meeting at the embassy. He may have looked at it and found nothing of interest at all - why not to publish it? However a foreign intelligence service would be quick to note that there is only one person who might be there who likes a certain exotic food - and that food was on order. Guess what, that person was invited - a valuable information, and other people can now take it further.
To declassify something you need to know the reasons why the information was classified to begin with. Then you can check if those reasons are no longer true, and that no new reasons showed up. A single soldier in a shack in the middle of nowhere does not, cannot (or at least shouldn't) have access to all that information - and even if he does he doesn't have the attention span or skills to properly consider all the implications. Old records are declassified all the time, but it takes a lot of effort. You cannot just rubberstamp a DVD full of data as unclassified, sight unseen. This guy did just that, without authority and without a good reason. That's not how things are done ... anywhere, not just in the army.
That’s all well and good. Except for the part about not being able to be a whistleblower in intelligence. Of course you can, as elsewhere. You can be sued, for instance, by private companies for breaking contracts. Whistleblowing usually is accompanied by consequences, otherwise we call it something else.
Anyway, what ypu say is not really what I was talking about. He can be punished; that’s the law. I just don’t feel the need to call him traitor and such. And I don’t like the unilateral nature of what does or doesn’t get to be called a secret in the National Security State. But this has been going on since Truman, the watershed, and before. It isn’t dependent upon this particular case.
There isn’t any reason to assume information is classified for good reason. Very often it is classified for bad reasons. There isn’t any way to have someone else decide what should and should not be, for then it wouldn’t be secret. Or, rather, it’d be less secret.
My problem is with pretending every damn thing is tied to national security. We’ve been on a war footing since 1941, basically. We’ve been at pretend war with an abstract concept—terror—and real, official war with a couple of countries for over a decade. That’s an awful long time for the mice to play while the cat is locked out.
We have to take Obama’s word, for instance, that the US citizens he has robots blow up deserved to be blown up, and didn’t deserve due process. We can’t see what evidence they used to reach that conclusion. Trust him, it’s there. We won’t ever know what the hell happened in Benghazi unless and until secrets out themselves. Maybe them worrying about tattletales is the only incentive to behave in the meantime.
If he’s not a traitor, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg’s family needs to file a lawsuit. They were executed for espionage during a time of war. And they were civilians!!
How else is involved? That needs to be found out. An E-3 cannot do this alone.
An E-3 cannot do this alone.
&&&
I have wondered about that all along. My suspicions are that this little swishy boy is just a useful idiot. The Soros Administration wanted the info leaked to do damage to our intel and/or military.
Manning is put away and can’t talk. Conveniently, after Assange’s name was all over the media, Assange was detained for a trumped-up sex charge. This kept him from talking.
I am reminded of the Los Alamos leak scandal during Clinton’s Infestation of the WH, when the Chinese born Wen Ho Lee (sp?) was charged with something like taking home classified files. Then Clinton sent it Bill Richardson to take charge of the lab. I maintain that Clinton sold nuclear secrets to the Chinese and then needed a cover story for how they got them. This scientist was innocent and used as a scape goat.
I don’t think Manning is innocent, but he is just the tiny fish in all of this.
The sentence should be death. Life imprisonment is inadequate.
good post. Thank you for your service.
He knew going in the military’s position on homosexuality just as Sandra Fluke, left wing feminazi, knew going into a Catholic univerity their stance on providing birth control and abortions.
They are activists first.
It’ll be a travesty if this traitor only gets ten years, he should get a minimum of forty years to life.
Like you said, he knew exactly what he was doing and knew the consequences and it shouldn’t matter in the least that he’s light in the loafers. No telling how many lives he cost whether American or Iraqi.
He should be made an example of, especially now that gays serve openly.
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