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Manning’s Apology: Try Compassion and Understanding, Not Vindication
With the Bradley Manning sentencing decision expected in about a week, much attention has turned to his statement in court on August 14 essentially begging for leniency, and thus his life. Many people who support Manning are confused and maybe saddened by his apology and contrition. Others seem gladdened, feeling that Manning humiliated himself and chose not to call himself a whistleblower.I see it differently.
Manning watched over more than three years as the government denied him first his rights, then attempted to break him psychologically, then subjected him to a drumhead court martial based on denied defense motions, limits on witnesses he could call, exaggerated and stacked charges and a lack of transparency. He saw that he was convicted of espionage even after the government admitted that they could show no actual harm done by his disclosures and that no foreign power was helped. He spied for no one, and aided no one but the American people in better understanding how America makes war and conducts diplomacy.
The totality of this left Manning with no choice but to exercise the last chance at justice he had left, a sentence actually in line with what he actually did, as opposed to the defacto death sentence the government seeks. I am saddened that the process pressed Manning into this final act of subjugation as his only hope for a whiff of fairness.
Wikileaks said something similar:
“The only currency this military court will take is Bradley Manning’s humiliation. In light of this, Mr. Manning’s forced decision to apologize to the U.S. government in the hope of shaving a decade or more off his sentence must be regarded with compassion and understanding… Bradley Manning’s apology was extracted by force, but in a just court the US government would be apologizing to Bradley Manning. As over 100,000 signatories of his Nobel Peace Prize nomination attest, Bradley Manning has changed the world for the better. He remains a symbol of courage and humanitarian resistance.”
(A quick Google search for images with the term “Manning” turns up more pictures of NFL quarterbacks Peyton and Eli than Bradley. He’s already slipping down the Memory Hole.)
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Rich Bauer said...
1AS the “system” was so vulnerable, why haven’t the system developers and administrators been charged as real threats to our national security. For every Manning, how many Insider Threats are working for the Chinese and Russians who have exploited the “system” for financial gain?
If our “transparent” president wants US to rat out “Insider Threats” in the US Government other than people like Edward Snowden who have revealed the NSA spy policy is transparent as mud, then a little introspection is in order because the National Security Agency analysts have broken privacy rules thousands of times: The Washington Post, using documents provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, reported that the NSA “has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008.”
(insert laugh track here) “We take each report seriously, investigate the matter, address the issue, constantly look for trends, and address them as well — all as a part of NSA’s internal oversight and compliance efforts,” said a statement from John DeLong, NSA’s director of compliance.
In a separate statement, the NSA said its “foreign intelligence collection activities are continually audited and overseen internally and externally. When we make a mistake in carrying out our foreign intelligence mission, we report the issue internally and to federal overseers and aggressively get to the bottom of it.”
DeLong of the NSA said, “We want people to report if they have made a mistake or even if they believe that an NSA activity is not consistent with the rules,” and that the NSA has set up an “internal privacy compliance program.” Drop the report form off at the main gate as you hand your ID card to the guard on your way out.
“They manage NSA’s rules, train personnel, develop and implement technical safeguards, and set up systems to continually monitor and guide NSA’s activities,” DeLong said. “We take this work very seriously.”
Obama has also appointed a special commission of experts to report by the end of the year “so that we can move forward with a better understanding of how these programs impact our security, our privacy, and our foreign policy.”
Sorry Barry, we UNDERSTAND perfectly. In this administration you don’t have to keep US guessing who the real INSIDER THREAT is.
08/16/13 4:26 PM | Comment Link
Helen Marshall said...
2I am saddened – by the humiliation that this administration has chosen to dump on Bradley Manning, supposedly in the name of my “security.” Bovine excrement! I am ashamed. We should all share in this humiliation.
If anyone wonders why Snowden won’t return to the US to “explain his actions,” and Assange will not head for Sweden, you should be able to figure it out now.
08/16/13 5:39 PM | Comment Link
pitchfork said...
3Living proof the US Military has become that which my father fought against in WW ll. He was already angry when he died. I’m glad he didn’t see this travesty or it would have broke his heart. As a crew member of the PBY who discovered the Jap fleet heading towards Midway, he saw plenty of atrocities. Had he seen the “collateral murder” tape, and the subsequent Barnum and Baily Circus of the Absurd trial of Manning..I don’t know what he would have done. I do know this though.
After learning of and reading the Pentagon Papers, and then seeing the lies of Bush to lead us into illegal war..he became outraged. But when he found out about Bushes/Haydens illegal wiretapping..that was it. He forever more repudiated any connection to his former military oath, whereby..on his deathbed, made me promise to pack up all his military uniforms and medals, and send them to Obama with a prior written scathing letter of condemnation and contempt for the war crimes perpetrated in HIS name. I mailed it last year, and I hope Obomination choked on it.
As for Manning…I can only hope that at some point, the DIMWITTED population of this country finally sees the living proof this government has become beyond ILLEGITIMATE..whereby millions of citizens surround these motherfuckers granite palaces ready to drag them out and BURN THEM ALIVE. And then, free those political prisoners whose tortured lives will become living testimony to the brutal crimes of this government during their short but sweet trials. yesireebob. Living testimony. I for one, if I live to see it, will cheer at the top of my lungs. Long Live Liberty.
In the meantime…fuck these cockroaches from hell.
08/17/13 10:02 PM | Comment Link
Michael Murry said...
4“The very fact of his case has revealed the true nature of the system arrayed against him, and against us.” — Chris Floyd, Empire Burlesque
08/18/13 2:04 AM | Comment Link
Michael Murry said...
5“Eppur si muove”
The Inquisition threatened Galileo with dungeon and torture, so he recanted the truth of what he had discovered. No one thinks less of Galileo today or more of the Church that revealed its own bankruptcy by persecuting him.
As legend has it, sometime later in life when his own circumstances no longer mattered so much to him, Galileo reportedly said of the earth he stood on:
“But still it moves”
I sincerely hope that Bradley Manning lives to make such a statement, once free of the Orwellian American state that has revealed its own bankruptcy by persecuting him.
08/18/13 2:13 AM | Comment Link
Michael Murry said...
6Thinking of President Obama here, exulting in the forced confessions tortured out of the little army private that he ordered broken, penitent, and pathetically grateful that the Party has shown him the error of his ways. Obama and his military minions remind me more than anything of the Party apparatchik O’Brien torturing Winston Smith in the Ministry of Love in Orwell’s 1984:
“Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible — and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling at our feet of his own accord. That is the world we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it.”
Damn their eyes.
08/18/13 2:20 AM | Comment Link
pitchfork said...
7quote:” Obama and his military minions remind me more than anything of the Party apparatchik O’Brien torturing Winston Smith in the Ministry of Love in Orwell’s 1984:”unquote
Precisely, and Arthur sums it up supinely.
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/
There is nothing to add, other than I would burn the eyes out of every single WDC cockroach if I could. They have betrayed us. The Ministry of Love is in control…for now. But not forever. EVER. At some point..their traitorous folly will destroy themselves at the hands of an insurrection of biblical proportions. And here is the start…….
http://www.examiner.com/article/oath-keepers-portray-obama-as-big-brother-at-white-house-d-c-metro-stop
Big Brother, Obombination. perfect. Go Oathkeepers.
08/18/13 4:45 PM | Comment Link