I haven’t mentioned Bradley Manning on this blog since she was sentenced to prison. Here’s why. And here’s what I thought about the sentence.
For me, nothing has changed in the interim.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Several good posts about this over at LGM. The 35 years was harsh but she definitely deserved some jail time.
Well you might say she has served her jail time. All the appalling humiliation at the beginning of her sentence did nothing except satisfy the sadistic needs of certain military in the style of Abu Ghraib. Evidently Barack Obama recognized this. I’ll miss him but I’m glad he’s going. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not all happy to see Donald Trump coming. Maybe the White House needed to stay empty for a while to starve all the ghosts residing in it.
Yeah, there was a lot of ancillary bullshit to be sure. And solitary confinement is almost always out of line.
In Siberia residents clean out their houses of pests by turning off the water and the heat and then going away for a few days. When they come back? Pest-free!!!
The entire DC establishment could use a good, long freeze…long enough for the pests to find it necessary to leave and go elsewhere.
AG
The Daily Beast
Thus, Manning should have received less punishment than what Petraeus received.
Or Petraeus should have received more punishment than Manning.
But he didn’t; so, the precedent is Petraeus under the Obama administration Justice Department.
Manning was court-martialed nder the UCMJ.
Both generals conveniently were retired when they committed their leaks. How exactly did they have access to the information that they leaked?
And both leaked material of higher sensitivity or classification level than what Manning leaked.
Yes, apples to moon rocks. Or as it is otherwise known, “Rank has its privileges.” Impunity seems to be one of them.
Yeah, Petreus didn’t even have the gloss of a positive motive to defend himself. He clearly got off lightly. What I’m pointing out is that the claim the precedent is Petraeus under the Obama administration Justice Department is arrant nonsense. The Obama administration Justice Department and any actions it took had nothing to do with with the prosecution of Manning. The military system of justice is an entirely separate system that operates under its own rules.
Yes, and it will be Mad Dog Mattis and not Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III who will have to implement the release.
At the moment, I’m not trusting the Trump administration to do anything but play fast and loose with the law, clogging up courts with futile suits.
My totally irrational fear is that Manning gets caught in this change in executive operation and the release never happens. We just don’t know how Trump will actually operate as President. Indications are that he will operate as an authoritarian, trying to move quickly to consolidate power and command legitimacy of the deep state institutions. Would shafting Manning play to that?
My totally irrational fear is that Manning gets caught in this change in executive operation and the release never happens.
Not going to happen. Once a president does it there is no going back. So Trump can’t reverse it.
That’s probably right — someone around Trump will tell him that not releasing Manning would set a new precedent for subsequent Presidents who could reverse all those unconditional and absolute pardons that Trump is going to need.
I do think it’s law though. But yeah, they won’t want to set a precedent that way.
Both should have got jail and Petraeus should have been stripped of his rank. Sucks that Petraeus got a slap on the wrist. Manning was treated harshly for sure, but independent of that treatment, prosecution was not out of line for what she did.
One of the things L,G, &M discusses,
——————-
An example of the latter were the cables that revealed the existence of discussions between the United States and China over contingency planning in the event of a North Korean collapse. The public benefits immensely from such talks, but the talks would not have happened had Beijing not been assured of their secrecy.
———————-
Talks with China about North Korea are incredibly important. And the fact is China won’t talk about it if what they say gets made public.
Manning deserved jail time..now she gets out. A pardon would have been egregious, but a commutation is fair.
.
Sentenced by the truly guilty for a heroic act.
This is justice?
AG
“… we have a system in place for declassifying documents …
○ CIA makes 12m pages of declassified documents searchable online – January 18, 2017
Only after another long, costly legal proces.
Each administration is more secretive than its predecessor, Obama illustrated it with how the “Government” treats whistleblowers, throwing the Espionage Act of 1917 at them and remaining silent in court because of “national security” interest. The Washington political establishment holds none of its citizens to account for overseas war crimes, except for just a handful of cases. Even protected the mercenaries of Erik Prince in Iraq.
The UK is doing a better job [not so difficult], although the whitewash in Whitehall is quite dominant. Both David Cameron and Theresa May are delightful to escape the EU and its system of justice, the ECJ and the ECtHR.
○ UK Supreme Court on rendition and torture – January 17, 2017
○ Cameron ‘committed to breaking link with European court of human rights’ | The Guardian – June 2015 |
○ UK must leave European convention on human rights, says PM May | The Guardian – Aug. 2016 |
○ Challenge Over UK Bulk Hacking Powers Taken to European Court of Human Rights | Motherboard – Aug. 2016 |
Cue rueful laughter…
Josh Marshall
@joshtpm
The beauty of this is that Assange gets to accept the invitation to the inaugural. So it’s really a beautiful thing.
1:40 PM – 17 Jan 2017
If the US military assiduously investigated war crimes (illegal under US law and UCMJ), Chelsea Manning might not have experienced the cognitive dissonance between taught American values and cynical warfare. The cockpit video in “Collateral Murder” shows gratuitous and unnecessary violence that resulted in the death of a journalist. (Was that result intentional or not?) It is likely that the use of drugs to prolong duty hours of soldiers contributed to this criminal act. And like My Lai in the Vietnam War, it was covered up right up the chain of command. There is no clearer view that the US presence in Iraq was not at all meant for liberation of the Iraqi people.
You want people not to leak, live up to your values, don’t hire people who are more interested in money, and don’t have a culture of official leaks to the press to cover up the source of propaganda to the voters.
Manning’s harsh punishment of 35 years and quick isolation in solitary confinement was what caused Snowden to leave the US to what he thought was a safe haven to transfer his USB drives to Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and to have those files duplicated in transmissions to Barton Gellman and journalists in Spain and Germany.
Manning has been in military criminal justice custody for seven years in May. She has been at Fort Leavenworth military prison for four years. She has been held incommunicado except for passing messages through her lawyers for that entire time. The first part of her custody was in a cell that was the functional equivalent of a “tiger cage” lockup, a clear violation of human rights law.
No one has catalogued the damage that the leak of “Collateral Murder” and “Cablegate” files did to the US that the US’s own misadventures and lies had not already done. Only the US public does not know what the US has been up to in its national security and foreign relations policies.
What could have been a helpful airing of malfeasance and hypocrisy was suppressed by an administration claiming to stand for transparency and a media with a strange sense of American values.
Too bad that realization has not made it through the iron curtain that surrounds official Washington. Had there been accountability, it would not be so easy for Trump to double down on war crimes.
I’m reminded when people get on their high horse about secrecy that the court case that established the absolutist laws of government secrecy in the US was US v. Reynolds in 1953 that saw the State Secrets privilege made an extension of Presidential power.
A 1948 accident of a Air Force test flight killed an RCA contractor. His family sued for compensation under the Federal Tort Claims Act. The court allows the government to use the State Secrets privilege to prevent the admission of accident reports to the court. When the case was declassified, researchers found that there was nothing that merited asserting that privilege but the unwillingness to pay compensation for liability.
What secrecy does is corrode the trust between the people and its government because the information to support that trust is not available for verification and subsequent information upon declassification shows when the government in fact was either lying or engaged in illegal action.
Sixty-three years of secret government have put in place the machinery of fascism that a significant number of Democrats think Trump will put to his own use. And this time, we have no checks and balances in a corrupt and gerrymandered Congress.
When do the criminals and not the whistleblowers get called to accountability and serve their time in court.
Continued moralizing about keeping secrets does not in fact keep us safer. Not unlike the case with allowing backdoors for law enforcement in computer systems. Those backdoors are the openings through which hackers hack systems that are well-constructed (a rarity with the rush for new releases) and have adequate encryption (woefully missing in much of US government systems outside of the hardened military systems with which Manning worked.)
The issues of secrecy of the government, privacy of individuals, and security of the internet are all intertwined challenges to actual democratic functioning. If this is not what the Democratic Party is ultimately about, maybe they should change their name to state clearly what they are about.