You may be aware that former US soldier Bradley (or Chelsea) Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in prison for violations of the Espionage Act; namely the biggest leak of classified documents in US intelligence. Like Snowden (s)he’s a polarising figure, although unlike Snowden (s)he was caught and sentenced. Some say (s)he’s an American hero for exposing illegal activity and war crimes; others say (s)he is a traitor for putting people at risk and betraying his/her job.
By way of comparison Anders Breivik shot dead 77 innocent people and was sentenced to 21 years in jail.
Do you think the sentence was fair, lenient or too harsh? If you were the military judge what would you sentence him too?
I think 35 years is in the ballpark of what is justified, but I believe that time (or a large percentage of it) should be actually served. It would be a joke if Manning only served eight years.
And it’s totally unfair to raise Anders Breivik, because he was prosecuted under another country’s laws, plus the reference to 21 years is totally deceptive in that nobody actually believes that he will serve 21 years. It’s widely acknowledged that the term of his confinement is the maximum afforded under law, and that the sentence is subject to perpetual extension, which everyone believes will happen. Breivik will leave the Norwegian prison as a dead man.
Too light, given parole. If he was to serve 35 years, I’d say it was about right.
Whatever other people may have served for unrelated offenses isn’t really relevant unless you wanted a conversation about whether or not their sentence fit their own crimes.
Twenty years at hard labor sounds about right to me, but I am talking about time served, not a sentence.
But I don’t think it beyond the realm of possibility that he will commit suicide, either in prison or upon release. Bitches be crazy, as Sheldon Cooper teaches us.
That’s not a fair comparison. Breivik was convicted and sentenced in Norway. Had he done the same thing in this country, he would have been eligible for the death penalty in states that have it, and certainly would have been sentenced to a much longer term in prison if he managed to avoid the death penalty.
The court didn’t find him to be treasonous or to have aided the enemy. The linked article says: “the Departments of Defense and State were unable to tie his releases to the deaths of any U.S. informants.” That’s good enough for me to think that it just might be possible that some of those thousands and thousands of documents he released were classified for reasons other than national security. I’d like to know why our military needs to hide so much of their actions.
That makes him a whistleblower to me. He went about it the wrong way and there is no way he could have known if there was compromising information in any of the documents, he couldn’t have read them all. That makes him a dumbass and maybe even an intended traitor, who can say. So I’d vote he should get 20 years.
Now I’d like to know how many years the idiots that allowed him access to so much important data will get. Their slothful indifference to their duties led directly to this situation IMO and if it’s of such national importance then those guys should getting their balls kicked about now. Fortunately for them, we’ve caught that rascal Manning and we can all just go back to doing what we were doing before.
Apparently, this has been a known fact that she was working through for a while now-- exchanges from when she was in the military came up during sentencing.
Apparently, this has been a known fact that she was working through for a while now-- exchanges from when she was in the military came up during sentencing.