Tyran wrote:

 Monster Rain wrote:
I think the sentence is fair enough.

His life is basically ruined as it is from all this nonsense. Eight years in federal prison isn't a picnic.

Travels to Venezuela, now he is a celebrity .

 Alfndrate wrote:

 Tyran wrote:

 Monster Rain wrote:
I think the sentence is fair enough.

His life is basically ruined as it is from all this nonsense. Eight years in federal prison isn't a picnic.

Travels to Venezuela, now he is a celebrity .

Ends up winning Miss Universe.

 Monster Rain wrote:
I think the sentence is fair enough.

His life is basically ruined as it is from all this nonsense. Eight years in federal prison isn't a picnic.

What Bradley Manning's Sentence Will Tell Us About Our Military Justice System

By Michael Moore

Today Bradley Manning was convicted on 20 of 22 counts, including violating the Espionage Act, releasing classified information and disobeying orders. That's the bad news. The good news is he was found not guilty on the charge of "aiding the enemy." That's 'cause who he was aiding was us, the American people. And we're not the enemy. Right?

Manning now faces a potential maximum sentence of 136 years in jail. When his sentence is announced, we'll all get a good idea of how seriously the U.S. military takes different crimes. When you hear about how long Manning – now 25 years old – will be in prison, compare it to sentences received by other soldiers:

Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the senior military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib and the senior officer present the night of the murder of Iraqi prisoner Manadel al-Jamadi, received no jail time. But he was reprimanded and fined $8,000. (Pappas was heard to say about al-Jamadi, "I'm not going down for this alone.")

Sgt. Sabrina Harman, the woman famously seen giving a thumbs-up next to al-Jamadi's body and in another photo smiling next to naked, hooded Iraqis stacked on each other in Abu Ghraib, was sentenced to six months for maltreating detainees.

Spec. Armin Cruz was sentenced to eight months for abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and covering up the abuse.

Spc. Steven Ribordy was sentenced to eight months for being accessory to the murder of four Iraqi prisoners who were "bound, blindfolded, shot and dumped in a canal" in Baghdad in 2007.

Spc. Belmor Ramos was sentenced to seven months for conspiracy to commit murder in the same case.

Sgt. Michael Leahy Jr. was sentenced to life in prison for committing the four Baghdad murders. The military then granted him clemency and reduced his sentence to 20 years, with parole possible after seven.

Marine Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich received no jail time for negligent dereliction in the massacre of 24 unarmed men, women and children in 2005 in the Iraqi town of Haditha. Seven other members of his battalion were charged but none were punished in any way.

Marine Lance Cpl. Jerry Shumate and Lance Cpl. Tyler Jackson were both sentenced to 21 months for the aggravated assault of Hashim Ibrahim Awad, 52, a father of 11 and grandfather of four, in Al Hamdania in 2006. Awad died after being shot during the assault. Their sentences were later reduced.

Marine Lance Cpl. Robert Pennington was sentenced to eight years for the same incident, but served only a few months before being granted clemency and released from prison.

Marine Sgt. Lawrence G. Hutchins III was sentenced to 15 years for murder in the Awad case but his conviction was soon overturned and he was released.

No soldiers received any punishment for the killing of five Iraqi children, four women and two men in one Ishaqi home in 2006. Among the U.S. diplomatic cables leaked by Bradley Manning was email from a UN official stating that U.S. soldiers had "executed all of them." When Wikileaks published the cable, the uproar in Iraq was so big that the Nouri al-Maliki government couldn't grant any remaining U.S. troops immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts, thus forcing the Obama administration to abandon its plans to keep several thousand U.S. soldiers in Iraq permanently. All U.S. troops were removed at the end of 2011.

My guess is Bradley Manning will spend more time in jail than all of the other soldiers in all of these cases put together. And thus, instead of redeeming ourselves and asking forgiveness for the crimes that Spc. Manning exposed, we will reaffirm to the world who we really are.

 Ouze wrote:
He got off light, comparatively

 AlexHolker wrote:
Got off lightly? Are you fething kidding me? It's a longer sentence than everyone involved in Abu Ghraib put together.

Bradley Manning Headed To Prison, While Those Who Presided Over Torture Go Free

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/21/bradley-manning-prison_n_3789867.html

ORT MEADE, Md. -- Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison on Wednesday for releasing 700,000 documents about the United States' worldwide diplomacy and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Manning was a 25-year-old Army private first class at the time of his arrest. He saw himself as an idealist acting to end the wars, and said in online chats with hacker Adrian Lamo that he was particularly concerned about the abuse of detainees in Iraq. No political or military higher-ups have ever been prosecuted for detainee abuse or torture in Iraq, Afghanistan or at Guantanamo Bay.

"One of the serious problems with Manning's case is that it sets a chilling precedent, that people who leak information ... can be prosecuted this aggressively as a deterrent to that conduct," said Andrea Prasow, senior counterterrorism counsel and advocate in Human Rights Watch's U.S. Program. "Shouldn't we be deterring people who commit torture?"

Here are some of the individuals who have been involved since 9/11 in detainee abuse and torture, and potential war crimes, and have never been prosecuted.

George W. Bush
George W. Bush was president when the U.S. invaded Iraq based on faulty intelligence, tortured terror prisoners and conducted extraordinary renditions around the world.

"Enhanced interrogation," a Bush administration euphemism for torture, was approved at the highest level. A "principals committee" composed of Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft signed off on the methods.

"There are solid grounds to investigate Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tenet for authorizing torture and war crimes," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, when the group released a report called "Getting Away With Torture" in 2011.

Dick Cheney
As Bush's vice president, Cheney pushed the nation over to the "dark side," as he called it, in the war on terror.

The U.S. used extraordinary renditions to swoop up terror suspects and send them to repressive regimes in places like Syria and Libya for torture. Cheney was the key driver in producing the faulty intelligence that led the U.S. into war in Iraq. And he steadfastly defended the CIA's use of water-boarding and other torture tactics on U.S. prisoners.

Cheney "fears being tried as a war criminal," according to Colin Powell's former chief of staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, but he never has been.

Donald Rumsfeld
One of the planners of the Iraq War, Rumsfeld steadfastly maintained while Defense Secretary under Bush that U.S. soldiers did not have an obligation to stop torture being used by their Iraqi counterparts. He also approved of "stripping prisoners naked, hooding them, exposing prisoners to extremes of heat and cold, and slamming them up against walls" at Guantanamo.

While deployed to Iraq, Manning discovered that Iraqi soldiers had arrested members of a political group for producing a pamphlet called "Where Did the Money Go?" decrying corruption in the cabinet of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

"‘i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on," Manning wrote in the chat logs. "he didn’t want to hear any of it … he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees."

George Tenet and CIA torturers
Tenet was the CIA chief who told Bush that the case for war with Iraq was a "slam dunk." Under his watch, the CIA waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

Further down the chain of command at the spy agency, lower-level officers have escaped prosecution for killing a prisoner in Iraq and one in Afghanistan in CIA custody. Attorney General Eric Holder in 2012 ruled out prosecuting anyone responsible for those deaths.

In sharp contrast, former CIA agent John Kiriakou is currently serving a 30-month sentence for revealing to reporters the names of interrogators involved in detainee abuse.

Abu Ghraib higher-ups
Although low-level soldiers like former Army Reserve Specialist Lynndie England were court-martialed for their role in detainee abuse at this notorious prison in Iraq, graphically illustrated in photos, the only officer prosecuted in the case had his conviction tossed out.

A 2009 Senate Armed Services Committee report found that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were not the result of a few unmonitored bad apples but rather the direct result of "enhanced interrogation" practices approved of by officials much higher up in the Bush administration.

 BrassScorpion wrote:
People with no grasp of facts to argue their point or back up their point of view always resort to personal insults. The Michael Moore piece is full of well documented factual information. Whether you like him or not it doesn't change those facts.

Personal insults are also against forum rules, so I'll refrain from saying what I think of you lot.

 whembly wrote:
Keep it up.


Back to OP: 8-35 years... does that send enough of a message for any future potential leakers?

"A Sad Day For All Americans": Human Rights and Legal Organizations Slam Bradley Manning Sentence

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/8/21/a_sad_day_for_all_americans_human_rights_and_legal_organizations_slam_bradley_manning_sentence

A military judge has sentenced Army whistleblower Bradley Manning to 35 years. Below are comments from legal and human rights organizations:

The Center for Constitutional Rights:

We are outraged that a whistleblower and a patriot has been sentenced on a conviction under the Espionage Act. The government has stretched this archaic and discredited law to send an unmistakable warning to potential whistleblowers and journalists willing to publish their information. We can only hope that Manning’s courage will continue to inspire others who witness state crimes to speak up.

This show trial was a frontal assault on the First Amendment, from the way the prosecution twisted Manning’s actions to blur the distinction between whistleblowing and spying to the government’s tireless efforts to obstruct media coverage of the proceedings. It is a travesty of justice that Manning, who helped bring to light the criminality of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, is being punished while the alleged perpetrators of the crimes he exposed are not even investigated. Every aspect of this case sets a dangerous precedent for future prosecutions of whistleblowers – who play an essential role in democratic government by telling us the truth about government wrongdoing – and we fear for the future of our country in the wake of this case.

We must channel our outrage and continue building political pressure for Manning’s freedom. President Obama should pardon Bradley Manning, and if he refuses, a presidential pardon must be an election issue in 2016.

Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union:

When a soldier who shared information with the press and public is punished far more harshly than others who tortured prisoners and killed civilians, something is seriously wrong with our justice system. A legal system that doesn’t distinguish between leaks to the press in the public interest and treason against the nation will not only produce unjust results, but will deprive the public of critical information that is necessary for democratic accountability. This is a sad day for Bradley Manning, but it’s also a sad day for all Americans who depend on brave whistleblowers and a free press for a fully informed public debate.

Widney Brown of Amnesty International:

Bradley Manning acted on the belief that he could spark a meaningful public debate on the costs of war, and specifically on the conduct of the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. His revelations included reports on battlefield detentions and previously unseen footage of journalists and other civilians being killed in US helicopter attacks, information which should always have been subject to public scrutiny.

Instead of fighting tooth and nail to lock him up for the equivalent of several life sentences, the US government should turn its attention to investigating and delivering justice for the serious human rights abuses committed by its officials in the name of countering terror.

Manning had already pleaded guilty to leaking information, so for the US to have continued prosecuting him under the Espionage Act, even charging him with ‘aiding the enemy,’ can only be seen as a harsh warning to anyone else tempted to expose government wrongdoing. More than anything else, the case shows the urgent need to reform the USA’s antiquated Espionage Act and strengthen protections for those who reveal information that the public has a need and a right to know.

Bradley Manning should be shown clemency in recognition of his motives for acting as he did, the treatment he endured in his early pre-trial detention, and the due process shortcomings during his trial. The President doesn’t need to wait for this sentence to be appealed to commute it; he can and should do so right now.

 BrassScorpion wrote:
More salient comments on the injustice of the sentencing in this case when people who committed far more heinous acts got lighter sentences or walked free.

 Seaward wrote:

 BrassScorpion wrote:
More salient comments on the injustice of the sentencing in this case when people who committed far more heinous acts got lighter sentences or walked free.

Your sources are all so credible that it's completely changing my view of this case.

 BrassScorpion wrote:
More salient comments on the injustice of the sentencing in this case when people who committed far more heinous acts got lighter sentences or walked free.

 Monster Rain wrote:
What makes me really laugh is the same bunch who treat Democracy Now! as gospel will cry the blues about Fox's conservative bias.

In Bradley Manning, We Finally Have a Scapegoat for the Iraq War

Manning serves as a fall guy for two failed wars against whom Republicans and the deeply compromised Democrats can unite in vindictive harmony.
Chase Madar
August 21, 2013

http://www.thenation.com/article/175855/bradley-manning-we-finally-have-scapegoat-iraq-war#axzz2cdCJCX2f

The best way to cope with humiliating military disaster is to find a scapegoat. For the Germans after World War I, it was leftists and Jews who “stabbed the nation in the back”—the Dolchstoßlegende that set the global standard. In the resentful folklore that grows like kudzu around our Vietnam War, American defeat is blamed on the hippies and anti-American journalists who sabotaged a military effort that was on the verge of total victory. (More sophisticated revanchists season this pottage with imprecations against General Westmoreland’s leadership.)
 
The horrible problem with our Iraq and Afghan wars is that policy elites can’t find anyone to blame for their failure. Widespread fatigue with both wars never translated into an effective antiwar movement with any kind of mass base or high public profile. As for journalists, even liberal media platforms like The New Yorker and MSNBC dutifully mouthed administration propaganda in favor of both wars. (The liability of a thoroughly embedded media is that they can’t be blamed for military failure.)

In other words, the usual suspects for stabbing-in-back whodunits all have ironclad alibis. Who will save us from this thoroughly unsatisfying anticlimax?

Enter Pfc. Bradley Manning. In the young Oklahoman we finally have a fall guy for two failed wars against whom Republicans and the deeply compromised Democrats can unite in vindictive harmony. His release of 700,000 documents to WikiLeaks is well under 1 percent of what Washington classified last year, but the moral panic it has generated among American media and policy elites has scratched a certain punitive itch. His thirty-five-year sentence is a sign that he must have done something seriously wrong. Finally, we have held someone responsible.

One almost has to admire the deft disingenuousness of our foreign policy mandarins. Though the real (and ongoing) carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan has elicited only their sulky silence, how they gush with brave humanitarian concern over the purely speculative damage they attribute to Manning and WikiLeaks! Some variation of “He has blood on his hands!” has been shrieked with joy by top civilian and military officials in the Obama administration.

The double-subjunctive mood of “may have put lives at risk of harm” is of course two degrees of reality removed from the actual slaughter that continues in our Afghan War (some 1,600 soldiers dead since Obama took office, and thousands more civilians, without any military or humanitarian gains to show), but no matter. Retired Brigadier General Robert Carr testified in the court-martial that there was no firm evidence of any Afghan civilian harmed by the release of the Afghan War logs. Military judge Denise Lind did not allow most of the State Department’s vaporous speculations of harm to US interests to be admitted as evidence against the young private.

But this doesn’t mean we can’t blame Bradley Manning. After all, he is the only player in the saga of our Iraq War to be prosecuted—or to make a public apology. “I am sorry that my actions hurt people,” said the private, facing a possible ninety years in prison, in an effort to throw himself on the mercy of the judge. After all, no mea culpas have sprung from the lips of George W. Bush or Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld or Condi Rice; not from Bill or Hillary Clinton, both of whom supported the Iraq invasion; not from David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, which editorialized in favor of the war after publishing spurious reports on the links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Nor has New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who told a bemused Charlie Rose that the United States needed to invade Iraq and tell its troublesome inhabitants to “Suck. On. This.” The Bush/Cheney administration’s torture lawyer Jay Bybee has not apologized, and the feckless Democrats have not apologized for failing to impeach Bybee off the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he now wields immense power, just one judicial layer beneath the Supreme Court of the United States. This long and distinguished list of non-apologies could go on, and on, and on—but fortunately we have found a private to blame.

So thank God for Bradley Manning. Not only did he provide us with hundreds of front-page news stories to enjoy with our morning coffee, he fulfills the sacred role of national scapegoat. All the good people who blame the teachers unions for child poverty and bicycle lanes for bad traffic can now hold Bradley Manning responsible for the military and humanitarian failures of the past decade, for the hundreds of thousands dead, for the trillions of dollars spent, for the long-term public health damage that will give parts of Iraq astronomical rates of birth defects for generations.

As Dolchstoßlegenden go, it’s pretty pathetic. But then our national standards have been slipping and it’s the best we can do. Manning’s thirty-five-year sentence could mean eight or nine more years in prison before release, at which point he will be able to live free, just like George W. Bush and Frank Wuterich, commander of the Marine unit that killed twenty-four civilians in Haditha, Iraq, many of them women and children slaughtered execution style. Manning’s sentence is shameful, cruel and stupid, like our Iraq War itself, to which the prosecution of this patriotic truth-teller is a bitterly appropriate finale.

 BrassScorpion wrote:
Real culprits for war crimes and recent military disasters go free while this young man gets 35 years in prison.

 Seaward wrote:

 BrassScorpion wrote:
Real culprits for war crimes and recent military disasters go free while this young man gets 35 years in prison.

It's bad, I agree.

We should've shot the dude.

 djones520 wrote:

 Seaward wrote:

 BrassScorpion wrote:
Real culprits for war crimes and recent military disasters go free while this young man gets 35 years in prison.

It's bad, I agree.

We should've shot the dude.

Yup.

The coals I was raked over once, for leaving a Secret safe unlocked when closing the shop up one night... this guy got off lucky for what he did.

 Monster Rain wrote:
What makes me really laugh is the same bunch who treat Democracy Now! as gospel will cry the blues about Fox's conservative bias.

 Easy E wrote:
Hmmm, 35 years seems a bit much considering we have no idea what the actual consequences of his actions were since they are all secret.

Granted, I don't know much about anything.

Read the full transcript of Bradley Manning's statement today. In his remarks, he quotes late historian Howard Zinn: "There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."

Bradley Manning: 'Sometimes You Have to Pay a Heavy Price to Live in a Free Society'

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/8/21/bradley_manning_sometimes_you_have_to_pay_a_heavy_price_to_live_in_a_free_society

The following is a transcript of the statement made by Pfc. Bradley Manning as read by David Coombs at a press conference on Wednesday after Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.

I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized in our efforts to meet this risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.

In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown our any logically based intentions [unclear], it is usually an American soldier that is ordered to carry out some ill-conceived mission.

Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy—the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, the Japanese-American internment camps—to name a few. I am confident that many of our actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.

As the late Howard Zinn once said, "There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."

I understand that my actions violated the law, and I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intention to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.

If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.