There are quite a few differences between the situation surrounding Eddie Slovik’s sentence, and that surrounding Bradley Manning, though both look like textbook examples of pour encourager les autres. I find it interesting, and more than a little discouraging for our Republic if this attitude is widespread, that the act of willfully deserting a combat unit in wartime, one that was about to start an attack anticipated to be extremely bloody, is now equivalent or not as bad as divulging to the American public what amounts to U.S. governmental and diplomatic dirty laundry.
FWIW, I find Slovik’s offense much more reprehensible than Manning’s. You cannot have a military in a total war if the troops feel they can quit with little effect. Prison wasn’t enough of a sentence. Slovik was expecting a short prison sentence and parole at the end of hostilities. Which hopefully would be soon. Quite rationally, he thought it was better than charging through the Bloody Huertgen. A widely publicized death sentence changes that calculus. It’s why the penalty for desertion in a combat zone has historically been so punitive.
Also, when did our current geopolitical situation resemble the U.S.A. of late 1944/early 1945? Divulging a near million documents to God and everyone might warrant a heavy prison sentence back then, but are we currently in the middle of a World War? With rationing, tens of thousands of dead, and hundreds of thousands of wounded? It’s not as serious a situation now as compared to then, so how can it be as serious a crime?
I agree that he got too much, unless we’re counting what he’ll get for good behavior, which is about nine years from what others have said here. Nine years is more appropriate.
Being a Private, Private (E-2), or Private First Class doesn’t mean someone’s irresponsible. It merely means that someone has not put in the time in service and time in grade requirements to bad advanced beyond those ranks. The reason a PV1/PV2/PFC would be handling classified information is because that’s their job.
From what I’ve gathered, Manning was a bit pre-occupied with handling classified information that he wasn’t actually supposed to have access to and managed to get around the restrictions on access. I may be wrong on that and welcome correction.
Private Manning is a hero. He should be given a huge boost in rank and pay and statues should be erected in his honor. (Or her honor, I’m cool with calling Manning whatever she wants to be called.) Manning had the courage and the patriotism to expose the evil deeds our government has been up to in Afghanistan and Pakistan, especially with regard to those double tap drone strikes where the deliberately target first responders to the first drone strike, recognized as a war crime by other, more civilized nations. He also exposed our policy of striking funerals and weddings.
These are evil things our leaders were doing, and Manning quite properly and patriotically exposed them.
What has happened to Manning is a travesty of justice and exposes the evil thing our government has become. I admire and respect Manning.
Everyone up the line believed that the sentence would be commuted.
Guys were being slaughtered in the front line of the European theater, and this guy refused to fight. There wasn’t much choice.
But the sentence was not commuted.
Well, your traitorous, thieving hero doesn’t agree with you, does he? Too bad for you. Don’t you want to be on the same page as this “hero” of yours. Ha—even he knows he fucked up. But you go right ahead and hold him up on a pedestal. I’d expect nothing more from you.
I’m all for whistleblowers, but the information he handed over to a foreigner was just a general data drop. He revealed things that should be secret as well as things the public should know about.
Snowden, on the other hand, is increasingly looking like he’s only revealing things that were mostly illegal, or on the cusp of illegality.
Yeah, they tortured her into saying what they wanted, combined no doubt with the threat of a lifetime in prison.
I also note you got nothing in response to the fact that Manning exposed definite EVIL on the part of the government. I wonder how evil the government would have to be to deserve exposure, in your eyes
Of course you want people to be punished for crimes. Any reasonable person would. That’s why I’m wondering why in your first post to the thread you focused on how he isn’t likely to repeat this crime (since he won’t be given a government job any time soon) and he’s not violent.
What do either of those two things have to do with his sentence? That’s my point. Sorry if I wasn’t clear about it. He broke the law and should be punished. His potential for violence and his likelihood of repeating the same crime shouldn’t be factors in that.
Oh, please. It was not a matter of him following orders. No one was asking him to shoot a baby. In his fucked up head he saw himself as Batman, here to save the world. It was not any orders he received that forced him to chose one side of a coin or the other. He went outside the scope of what was asked of him and turned himself into a thief and traitor.
HA! That’s the best you got? You little fucking hero doesn’t even agree with your nonsense, so you have to try to do anything you can to pound that round peg into that square hole. Face facts: the the guy is a thief and put the country at risk. Even HE admits it. Grow up.
And no, they didn’t torture him. You and your brethern are just making shit up in an attempt to make him a more sympathetic figure. But do you really have to be so transparent about it. Sheeze.
And no, solitary confinement is not torture. Sorry to burst your little bubble.
Of course, you’re wrong about this “EVIL”, but it’s really beside the point. It’s not up to some schmuck Private to decide what the right course is for the whole fucking country that has elected officials. You just can’t grasp that, can you? Nope. You can’t. Again, unsurprising.
Most of the things people think Manning “revealed to the world” had actually already been reported on by journalists who had either interviewed eyewitnesses to the events or had direct evidence of their own. The lion’s share of his release were innocuous cables that at worst showed mundane diplomatic spats or unearthed things of that nature.
The one thing he can be said to have released that was genuinely newsworthy was the helicopter attack video–an incident that has never been clearly established as a criminal act. (That means in a court, not in the court of lefty opinion.)
With a figure like Ellsberg he selectively leaked a document that showed a deception being perpetrated on the American people. Manning didn’t do that, he did something stupid for attention and had made no real intelligent decision making at all about either how he leaked it or to whom he leaked it. Given his actions had minimal benefit, were only laudable in a very small narrow context and are otherwise very dissimilar from something like what Ellsberg did there is nothing at all to excuse his crime. Ellsberg clearly committed a crime, but for good reason. Manning committed a crime for mostly no reason at all, and has become a cause celebre because people love to rally around the “nexus of ideas” that floats around the Manning issue. It lets people bitch about drone strikes (valid warfare and awesome, I wish we did 100x as many–the only complaint seems to be since there is no risk of dead Americans it’s bad), it lets people bitch about totally unrelated stuff (see Abu Ghraib mentioned several times in this thread when it has nothing to do with Manning) and opens up more bitching about things like torture (calling solitary confinement–definitely not torture, torture) and now that gender identity disorder and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell are involved this is basically your classic liberal wet dream. But unlike Daniel Ellsberg it really is just a wet dream based on stupidity, instead of being an actual example of John Brown-esque “breaking a law for just reasons.”
All that being said the crime Manning did commit, which is a serious one for good reason (most important of which is Privates are cogs, we should almost never accept them overruling the civilian authorities in terms of deciding what is valid classified material and what isn’t), is appropriately punished by his sentence. He’s already been in for several years, has credit for time served, and at his first parole hearing will have done a total of 12 or so years. That seems fine to me, I’d have been fine with him having 3-4 years less, even.