By that standard, anyone with whom you have a policy disagreement is an enemy of America; anyone who helps anyone with whom you have a policy disagreement is a traitor.
ETA: I don’t think that’s your ACTUAL standard for treason; but it is your STATED standard.
This. Fully agree with all this. (so I didn’t vote)
On the other hand, for now, all that we can be reasonably certain of is that he leaked the ‘Collateral Murder’ video. If it turns out that was the only thing he can be proven to have actually leaked, then he should not be punished whatsoever. That was some bullshit that needed to be leaked, unlike all the other stuff he’s suspected of leaking.
This is my view also. I certainly don’t think he’s even done anything to merit a life sentence, let alone be executed.
Here’s the relevant page from the Uniform Code of Military Justice, US military law for those who don’t know.
I don’t think “borderline fascistic” is a meaningless insult for the sake of being an insult in this context. Unless you meant “ludicrous”?
I’m also curious (although this isn’t my thread and no one should feel obligated to respond) what people think Manning should have done when he found that video of US soldiers killing Iraqi civilians: what would have been the right, non-treasonous thing to do?
I think there needs to be room for men adn women of conscience to make the decision to air the truth. I don’ tknow how that can be regulated or controlled. Perhaps it requires a third party? The UN maybe? I dunno, but there needs to be space for filling people in safely; and I don’t think any USA court can try him without prejudice.
So far WikiLeaks is one big masterbatory exercise. They have yet to expose anything we didn’t already know, but they did cause some serious embarrassment. It also let other countries know that our secrets could not be trusted to be secret, and will make negotiations more difficult. In fact, the only real result will be that our diplomats are given less information. This will cost the USA a lot of money, and could conceivably result in the loss of innocent lives.
Lock him up and throw away the key.
Speaking strictly about the “Collateral Murder” video, he should have done exactly what he did do. Except for the part when he bragged about it to an infamous hacker he met online who had various mental and legal problems - bad idea.
If you’re talking about that “Collateral Murder” video he should have kept his mouth shut because at no point was anything illegal done in that video. A PFC does not have that authority to decide what gets released to the public.
I once heard an NPR story about where the concept of ‘states secret priviledge’ comes from. Apparently it came from an airplane crash that the gov. wanted to cover up due to negligence. They just used national security as an excuse to cover it up.
I don’t think he is guilty of treason. I don’t see how releasing documents you feel the public has a right to know about could be considered treasonous.
Wikileaks is not an enemy of america, but they release documents to the public that can be read by an american enemy. Releasing documents that put american soldiers and agents in mortal danger is treasonous. He could have gone through the documents and only released the ones that did not put american and allied lives at risk. He did not do so, but instead deliberately chose to endanger people fighting al-queda and the taliban. Whether he gave the material directly to the taliban or gave it to a neutral intermediary does not change his crime.
When he found the video of the Iragi civilians being killed in a strike on armed insurgents he should have realized that war is a horibble thing and sometimes innocents are mistakenly killed. If he no longer felt he could in good conscience serve in the military, he could have come out, got his discharge and gone on his merry way instead of using the position he volunteered to enter to attack his country.
This as well. I have no problem with civil disobedience as a matter of principle but even Thoreau went to prison. But treason? If we didn’t execute Scooter Libby I can’t agree with executing Manning.
I also agree with this:
I keep waiting for WikiLeaks to come up with something a little more damning than the fact that diplomats say different things in private than they do in public. I can’t decide whether I prefer lack of accountability in our government or lack of accountability in private organizations like WikiLeaks but it’s not much of a win either way.
IMHO the ethics of leaking the airstrike footage are debatable because he presumably was aware of its content and judged it to be important for the world to see.
But leaking more than 250,000 documents whose contents you can’t possibly know? Insanely irresponsible.
I’m with Martin. Guilty of serious violations of law and regulation, but not treason; calls for doing hard time, but not capital punishment. If he felt morally or ethically compelled to break the rules, then the moral and ethical thing to do is to be ready for the consequences (and only a fool would not expect to be made an example of how rough can the consequences be).
You’ve changed my mind a bit here. Thanks for this.
At least “to encourage the others” not to betray their duty and their country.
Yes, he is a traitor, and twenty years at hard labor seems about right to me.
Regards,
Shodan
Honest question: Why do people have such a hatred for Wikileaks?
They didn’t steal the documents, but are only the messenger, a conduit (or facilitator at best) for others to release (in this case stolen) information. If Manning had gone direct to a newspaper would you hold the editor of the paper in the same contempt for publishing? Or if Manning had set up his own web-site, uploaded the documents and posted a link to it on a message board, then would it all be on him or on the message board that hosted the link and the site?
I fail to see what, if anything, is special about Wikileaks that makes them a target for such vitriol and anger. If they hadn’t published the documents, 50 others would have stepped up to do so.
This is a great point and something that I think is being overlooked. While the documents that were released did not contain information that was damaging to military operations; he could not have known that.
Ignorance is not a defense and neither should ‘Well, nothing really bad happened.’
Just popping in to point out that he is also a British citizen. That complicates matters, though not necessarily by much: a dual US-UK citizen (murderer) was executed in Texas in 2003, and another one in Georgia in 2002.