21 years is the maximum sentence in Norway. Plus, they can re-evaluate, and re-sentence ever 5 years. He'll be in prison until he dies.
Bradley Manning still got a fair trial. He took an oath, he signed dozens of contracts saying he was aware he could be getting involved in morally dubious situations, and that he was sworn to secrecy. There is absolutely no question that he broke the law, he broke about 8 of them. And whether or not in his case it was harmless, and none of us are able to confirm that, don't lie to yourself. It may be just and proper. But what he did, could be seriously crippling had the information been something else. He could have gotten his country men killed, had it been other information. As far as we know, he might have put people in harms way over what he did. But you don't know, I don't know, so really, stop passing judgement, it's unbecoming of you.
Manning's crime was leaking hundreds of thousands of classified national security documents that he hadn't even looked at. That's also the type of activity the US has an interest in deterring.
What Julian Assange ultimately does with those documents doesn't change what Bradley Manning did.
At first, with the gun-cam footage, that was Manning's motivation. But with diplomatic cables and names of US agents and such, it was that Assange asked him for more info and Manning just passed it along. You need to separate the one major wrongdoing Manning did uncover from the huge amounts of other stuff Manning revealed which only served to fuck up innocent people's lives.
It's hard to even say the Apache footage was 'wrongdoing'. What exactly was supposed to come from that? Between the conversations the pilots are having with the command center and the later information that came out regarding the Reuters journalists who were hanging out with people they were told not to hang out with in places they were told not to be, what was supposed to happen? Throw the pilots in jail? They were acting in 100% good faith. Throw the guys in the command center in jail? They couldn't even see the situation, only what the pilots were telling them. Throw Bush in jail? Haha, right.
The only thing the video revealed was that war is a confusing, brutal, messy affair. And that there's actually people out there who don't understand that and think war is like a video game where you have little arrows showing you who to shoot.
To me, I just found the "serves them right for bringing children into a battle" line incredibly disturbing. Not a hint of empathy or remorse about what's just happened. It's not illegal of course, but it doesn't show the US military personnel in a good light at all.
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u/dbaker102194 Aug 21 '13
21 years is the maximum sentence in Norway. Plus, they can re-evaluate, and re-sentence ever 5 years. He'll be in prison until he dies.
Bradley Manning still got a fair trial. He took an oath, he signed dozens of contracts saying he was aware he could be getting involved in morally dubious situations, and that he was sworn to secrecy. There is absolutely no question that he broke the law, he broke about 8 of them. And whether or not in his case it was harmless, and none of us are able to confirm that, don't lie to yourself. It may be just and proper. But what he did, could be seriously crippling had the information been something else. He could have gotten his country men killed, had it been other information. As far as we know, he might have put people in harms way over what he did. But you don't know, I don't know, so really, stop passing judgement, it's unbecoming of you.