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Bradley Manning Takes "Full Responsibility" for Giving WikiLeaks Government Data
- dromidas 14y agoToday a criminal... in 100 years a hero.
- gnosis 14y agoHe's already a hero to many.
- sigzero 14y agoA hero to the stupid maybe. He is scum and a traitor.
- sxcurry 14y agoHow do you figure that? He gave us access to information that we have a right to, so that we can make our own informed decisions. Do you remember the Pentagon Papers and the effect they had on the Vietnam War? In my mind he's a true patriot.
- smokinjoe 14y ago> He gave us access to information that we have a right to I've heard this said quite a bit but am way too ignorant about it to form a logical opinion or know where to find more information. Basically, what information from the Gov't do we have a right to? All of it? Some of it? I know there are classified documents that are kinda essential to keeping people safe that would be better left confidential, but they eventually make it out, albeit heavily redacted. Is there some quick-reference (worth a shot..) or a place of reference I could at least start my journey? There's a lot of misinformation out there, especially regarding this case specifically.
- malbs 14y agoWhen your tax dollars are paying for military strikes, and you yourself are then made a target by angry foreigners blaming you for supporting your own government, I'd say you have a right to know what "they" are doing. How much? As much is needed for everyone to have a rationalised discussion. As I write this I realise that with media outlets such as FOX, that makes it pretty hard. As Bradley Manning said, most military information has a tactical shelf life of 48-72 hours, after that most information can (and should) be released. Perhaps a more transparent/accountable military would be a harder target for fundamentalists to rally support against, but I wouldn't actually know.
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- chimeracoder 14y ago> He didn't make any argument, He's making the argument that there exist certain documents that are "better left confidential", and that those documents "eventually make it out". Both statements are highly contestable, and I've offered a fairly extensive source by a Pulitzer prize winner to contradict those points. His final statement is ironic. We're talking about a man (Manning) who risked his life to uncover information that the government tried to conceal by spreading misinformation. The existence of misinformation about Manning's own story is nothing if not ironic. It's not an insult - to Obama, perhaps, but not OP - and my apologies if anybody took that way. However, taking the time to look me up on Twitter just to call me a 'prick' certainly doesn't offer anything valuable to the discussion and does nothing to keep the level of discourse on HN high.
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- malbs 14y agoScum / Traitor for reporting on US war crimes? You're actually serious!?
- dmm 14y agoWhat war crimes do you mean?
- malbs 14y agoI was being sensationalist, but that Apache footage has always stuck in my mind. Even if it was manipulated
- mc32 14y agoWell, there were some of that information, but there were also secret cables which had little to do with any war crimes. He could have just released the videos and not the other stuff, if you wanted to argue the war crimes angle. Finally, I think I agree with others. If you truly believe in your actions, you take responsibility, no matter the consequences. Such is how many in the war of independence saw it. They knew that if the British caught them, they'd likely be tried as traitors. Not saying all revolutions are have 'honorable causes'. Just saying it's honorable to take responsibility for what one does to further one's beliefs, even if the actions are not honorable, depending on view.
- malbs 14y agoI agree, made a comment about that on another reply
- chrischen 14y agoTechnically he was a traitor to the military, but the military was a traitor to society in general... So it evens out.
- DigitalSea 14y agoYeah, you're right. How dare a guy risk his own life for the sake of doing what's right and telling us about the injustices of the United Stated Government we otherwise would have never been told or heard about. How dare someone like Bradley Manning stand up for the people, how dare he stand up for the truth... If the Government are killing innocent people and leading the public astray unless they tell us, we don't have the right to know the truth, right? This guy is only looking at spending the rest of his life in prison for the sake of letting people know what was happening, no big deal. I'll be back later, just going to turn on my TV and watch some Fox News. You like that channel too? So informative and they always tell us the truth, who needs Wikileaks when we have unbiased televised news? Maybe we can watch it together sometime, eat some genetically modified corn, polish our military grade automatic guns and sip on fluorinated water, it'll be great.
- MysticFear 14y agoNews alert to the uninformed about military conflict. Innocent people die when you go to war. Bradley Manning just leaked one instance of human error that caused innocent people to die. Now he will spend much of his life in prison. No idea why people call this guy a hero. If you read any history of any war, innocent people die because of human error.
- camus 14y agodrone killings is not war , it is state terrorism.
- kmfrk 14y agoWhat does it mean to be a criminal in the U.S. these days anyway?
- D9u 14y agoI believe it was President George "Dubya" Bush who said, "You're either with us, or you're against us." This mentality, coupled with the (unpatriotic) "Patriot Act," leaves a lot of room for defining criminality, which, apparently, the US Supreme Court, by its recent rulings, infers that all US citizens are potential criminals, if not actual. Thus the domestic surveillance program continues.
- iomike 14y agoBradley knows he was really just a pawn in the whole game created by Assange.
- austingunter 14y agoFull responsibility. Let's break that down. Full responsibility, on the surface, means that Manning is taking full responsibility under the law, and is not shying away from the legal consequences of his actions. He knows that according to the laws and the power structure, he's accountable for his actions which threaten said laws and power structure. Those self-interested parties will react in the appropriate way to defend the status quo. Full responsibility to history means something else entirely. Full responsibility to history means that Manning doesn't shy away from the responsibility he has in challenging a corrupt power structure, and fighting for the rule of law. He's accepting responsibility for standing up for truth, in spite of the legal consequences. He's accepting full responsibility for being part of something bigger than himself. Salutes
- dmm 14y ago> the responsibility he has in challenging a corrupt power structure What's the corrupt power structure and how did he challenge it?
- Karunamon 14y ago... you can't be serious. What exact part of that sentence are you taking issue with? The corrupt-ness of the US military and/or government, or the fact that releasing this information was a challenging act?
- dmm 14y agoBradley Manning is probably going to spend the rest of his life in prison. He's only 25! Holy shit that's a long time. He intentionally and indiscriminately released thousands of classified documents in direct violation of his duties. What specific instances of corruption did he uncover that justify what he did? Look, he was clearly unhappy. From what I've read it sounds like he was lonely, confused, and unstable. But he was given significant responsibilities and he violated that trust in a _very_ serious and criminal way. If he was unhappy there are many, many other things he could have done than release those files. What I see is this thread is just a bunch of platitudes. Yeah! he stuck it to the man! But what did he actually achieve? All I see is a fucked up young man making a _huge_ mistake.
- jarin 14y agoLooks like they finally broke him.
- malbs 14y agoHe's spent a good % of his life in prison, he's facing spending the rest in prison. Admirable that he is attempting to try and take the heat off of WikiLeaks/Assange, even after the incarceration he has already suffered (and likely to suffer into the future). If only more people were like him. Hell, how many people do you hear about, who, when charged with a crime put their hand up and say "Yes, I did it". Not many, even for simple things like traffic violations.
- slurgfest 14y agoPleas are actually very common. If he refused, then there would be people posting on how admirable it was that he stuck to his guns.
- mc32 14y agoThis is off topic, but in Japan it's not uncommon for people who commit serious crimes to turn themselves in at the nearest Koban. (There is also a large percentage of coerced guilty pleas --it's claimed that JP justice kind of mistreats (wears down people) to capitulate and assume responsibility) you can be held up to a month wihout charge or access to lawyers (formal arrest vs voluntary police custody). On the other hand JP police tend to only take on cases where they are very likely to win conviction --hence the very high conviction rate in Japan ~99% vs high 80s for the US. This habit leads to cases where police establish 'people fall down stairs' and die rather than pursue a murder conviction where the outcome is uncertain.
- bdcravens 14y agoI can't deny that he violated the trust placed in him by the military. That's a scary game, and one that I can't honestly take a position in, as I've never served. However, I feel that service is more than to your branch, commander, or unit. What is a soldier? Someone willing to sacrifice themselves for a greater, to defend those who can't defend themselves, to bring honor to their service. A US soldier serves the people first, the government second. Manning realized the risk he was placing his life in, and like a true soldier, he didn't let that knowledge deter him. In taking responsibility, he's holding his head high, not cowering behind attorneys and HTTP proxies. I can't say if he's right or wrong, but I can say that he showed courage befitting his title.
- magikarp 14y agoWell said.
- jws 14y agoIn taking responsibility, he's holding his head high, not cowering behind attorneys and HTTP proxies. You might be reading too much into this (or not). In the context of a plea bargain in the United States, "accepting responsibility" is a keyword. It triggers a significant reduction in your sentence.
- cjensen 14y agoIf a soldier thinks something is wrong, he might talk to a reporter and even provide classified examples if necessary to prove his point. That is not what Bradley Manning did. He did a full dump of information regardless of whether or not the information was related to his cause. That's not a courageous protest: that is playing God with other's lives on the line. In his delusion of Godhood, he literally committed treason. Sorry for the harshness of this, but it genuinely outrages me that people see heroism in this guy. His behavior is outside even the most liberal interpretations of the concept of non-violent protest or civil disobedience.
- thetrb 14y ago"that is playing God with other's lives on the line." That's the same pseudo-argument that keeps coming up again and again. Whose lives did he play with? Please don't answer with some hypothetical "aiding the enemy" crap. Wasn't it the U.S. military that originally played with lives aka "collateral damage"?
- samstave 14y agoHow many waterboardings did that take?
- mpyne 14y agoI am so, so, so disappointed that the narrative of the facts has been warped into something that isn't true. I expected it on Reddit, but not so much here. Given that I actually serve, let me explain why: He did the INFOSEC equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb. Whistleblowing is going, "Hey, I have evidence of War Crime FOO, I should leak this to somebody and blow the whistle". Not, "Oh, look at all this data I have access to, let's just FTP this shiat up to the latest foreign national to hit the news". In the DoD whistle-blowing is actually a thing, believe it or not. For instance U.S. soldiers committed a horrible atrocity in Iraq involving murder, rape, and arson [1]. The world was alerted to this by an Army soldier (of all things) , Pfc. Justin Watt, who revealed it to a mental health practitioner, who got U.S. Army investigators involved. Notably, Pfc. Watt suspected his chain-of-command would not believe him or would try to cover it up, and yet he still managed to alert investigators without revealing an entire CD-R's worth of classified material. Pfc. Manning did none of this. He didn't alert U.S. Army CID, the U.S. Army Inspector General (IG), the DoD IG, an American friend back home, a fellow soldier, or even the American media (as the Pentagon papers had been revealed). Edit: Turns out that Pfc. Manning almost managed to inform the media, but ran out of patience (or coffee, or something). But all of this is assuming that Manning had details of a set of war crimes (1 or many). Even this ends up being more favorable to Manning than reality though. Manning didn't leak "war crimes", he leaked whatever info he could download, without verifying that it was all actually evidence deserving of whistle-blowing. Much of those "evidence of war crimes" were instead the most mundane types of reports (e.g. diplomatic cables describing how Putin and Berlusconi were buddy-buddy, or patrol reports describing how soldiers patrolled a certain area to verify the safety of an Afghan informant). However nice it might be to peek into diplomatic traffic from the outside, it was still classified, it was not evidence of war crimes, and Manning never read it all anyways before he leaked it to a foreign national over an unsecure network. "But what about all the good stuff he was trying to do?", you might ask. Turns out he even had an ulterior motive to be mad at the Army, he had recently been demoted from Specialist for physically assaulting a fellow soldier. I'll bet Pfc. Manning doesn't even know how much of his exfiltration job was to get back at the Army, and how much was to "blow the whistle". And either way, you don't do horrible things just because it turns out well for a few people (unless you're a Wall St. banker, I suppose). The saddest part is that prior to 9/11 Manning wouldn't have been able to dream of having access to the information he had access to. 9/11 exposed deep flaws in the U.S. government's ability to handle intelligence agencies amongst the various agencies. It was better for FBI to hoards its intel, CIA to do the same, and etc. all down the line. After 9/11 it was finally realized that this wouldn't work when trying to defend from the kind of terrorism which kills thousands of people at a shot, and so interagency cooperation became the watchword. The thinking went, if we can trust a soldier enough to die for his country, have his own weapon, and have him analyze the workings of an Islamist group in Iraq, then surely we can trust him if we give him all the intel he needs to do his job, right? Right? I mean really, who's the bigger threat here, Al Qaeda or Pvt. Garcia? But it only takes one disgruntled soldier to prove otherwise. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_killings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_killings
- smogzer 14y agoManning was just a kid, playing games, never thought he was doing something that these skeletors of society would pursue him in the future for. And again, something that had no consequences gets a kid to suffer the rest of his life, just to keep military and courts and other "serious people" all of which that could also be seen as criminals of bigger crimes such as inflicting pain for a living (military instead of farmers and abundance, lawyers and judges instead of friendship and disputes in games and drinks). And these military go to war with the mote to spread freedom and democracy, what for ? to arrest kids for life ? Skeletors of the world... grow up, relax, have a beer and life for the swords to plow shares or tanks to tractors, or drones to aerial seed planters!