
Bradley Manning's Post-Sentencing Statement - llambda
http://holdenweb.blogspot.com/2013/08/bradley-mannings-post-sentencing.html
======
spodek
" _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._ "

One of my best friends spoke similarly when I met him after his tour as a
Marine in the first Gulf War in 1991. Based on what he saw, after long
introspection, he applied for conscientious objector status. He felt he was
sent around the world not to protect his country's freedom or safety, but
government and corporate interests. He felt his conscience could only oppose
all wars he could possibly imagine his country fighting. He could only learn
that by going, not from what his government told him before going.

The situation today seems more objectionable than then. I feel like the more
we learn about the government's actions, the yet more objectionable they seem.

I shudder when I connect the data point then to today's and extrapolate a few
years out.

But I still take inspiration from people who honor the Constitution over what
seems opposing policy.

(Edit: since people are asking about what happened to my friend, instead of
evaluating his conscientious objector intent, they gave him bureaucratic run-
around for years until it was easier for him to get his Honorable Discharge on
schedule.)

~~~
anigbrowl
Manning joined the military in late 2007 or early 2008...long after incidents
like the prison abuse at Abu Ghraib, and even the admission by President Bush
himself that the decision to go to war had been based on faulty intelligence.I
cannot take Manning's claims that he had no clue that there was anything
untoward going on until he arrived in Iraq and began reading secret military
reports.

Now, I wouldn't have expected him to have an adult's awareness of all the
political issues, but did this young man never see the front page of a
newspaper or watch a television news broadcast during the previous four years?
You would have to have been living under a rock to be unaware that the US
invasion of Iraq had been the subject of controversy.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Iraq_War](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Iraq_War)

~~~
jlgreco
So maybe he was living under a rock. Is that a crime?

What is the alternative hypothesis, that when he joined he had an
understanding of the ongoing horrors? That seems harder to believe than _" he
was in fact living under a rock."_

~~~
anigbrowl
He was between the ages of 19 & 20 when he joined the Army. I think it's quite
reasonable to expect basic adult awareness of what organization he was signing
up for and to be aware that the Iraq war was far from a clean-cut ethical
situation. If he lacked such basic awareness, then that does not say very much
for his judgment, does it? As it was, he had been described since high school
days as 'very smart, very opinionated, very political' and had taken college
classes in history before signing up for the army.

As it was he had a Top Secret clearance before he was ever deployed to Iraq.
Now there is no way he got a Top Secret clearance without exhibiting the
ability to understand the military context he was headed into. If he had
ethical reservations about the conduct of the war then it just might have been
a good idea to raise them prior to deployment, no?

I'm not unsympathetic to the guy, but taking his story at face value requires
adopting a position of _spectacular_ naivete.

~~~
resu_nimda
Not everyone thinks like you, not everyone has the same experiences and
viewpoints as you. There are people all over this country that continue to
enlist in and support the military, and view it and the government as forces
for good. Obviously he knew there was some controversy, but so what? That
doesn't mean he's going to make the same conclusions as you.

You're arguing from a certain viewpoint, and being blind to the fact that
people can come from different places that are entirely foreign to you. Maybe
he was brainwashed, or willfully ignorant, or something else; whatever the
case may be, it's possible for people to come to realizations that they were
unable to see before.

~~~
einhverfr
A parallel is useful. My father joined the Junior ROTC in high school, and the
ROTC in college. He rose eventually to the rank of second lieutenant in the US
Army Reserve. He started taking some of his college time to do charity work in
Mexico and eventually ended up helping build houses in a Native American
community that had finished an uprising against the government. He returned to
file for conscientious objector status only to discover he had been promoted
to First Lieutenant. Given that Vietnam was escallating, they refused his
request for a general discharge and he refiled. They called him up for active
duty and he refused. They sent him to to the stockade and he set himself up as
the go-to person for helping people apply for conscientious objector status.
His request for a general discharge was rejected again, on the basis that he
was too honorable for it. Six months later (more time in the stockade, I think
totalling around a year), they reached a deal where he would teach a driving
course and be honorably discharged. The course was done on film, but by the
time they finished it, they discovered that Lt. Travers had made such a name
for himself in the stockade in terms of helping people apply for discharges
that they couldn't use it. At the end of the day he was honorably discharged
and the court martial called off.

It's one thing to watch movies or think about things. It is another thing to
see the results of war with one's own eyes.

------
argumentum
I've always argued in defense of Manning's actions, but simultaneously that he
did break military law and should we be a nation of laws, he should be treated
accordingly.

I was wrong.

The State breaks the law. And _it does so daily_. For helping to point this
out Mr. Manning deserves a prize, not a punishment.

~~~
hobs
Yep, the rule of law argument is really only valid when the laws are not a
shamble, otherwise you just come off as authoritarian as far as I can see.

~~~
argumentum
How do we get more people to evolve to this position?

~~~
WalterSear
That's the _really_ bad news of the age: I don't think we can.

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and
making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die,
and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." \-
[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck)

Ideas, just like science, advance one funeral at a time.

~~~
thesteamboat
I'm not entirely sure that's true. Consider the rapid advances in the
mainstream acceptability of LGBT concerns over the past 20 years, and the
number of people who have come to `a new understanding'. Similarly, the shift
in perspective over the acceptability of racism; James Meredith, the student
whose enrollment at Ole Miss sparked riots, is still alive as are many of his
schoolmates. I'm reasonably sure that most of them have had their opinions
regarding integration changed by public opinion and the subsequent years.

~~~
sophacles
It would be interesting to know the amount of background efforts in the years
prior to these "sudden groundswells" (which makes me think of the overnight
success myth). For example in the civil rights situation, a a t of stuff
happened in the background of WWII and immediately after in the army, as well
as having lots of academic and popular writing going on.

I'm also interested inthe demographics of the social graph of the wave of
support. I suspect it starts in the 20somehing crowd realizing that they are
allowed to have their own valid opinions and taking up the banner that was
conveniently placed there for years prior waiting for them to find it. All
those years it was available were formative years for those people and the
idea was floating in the background, therefore not foreign.

------
sage_joch
Largely forgotten in all this is the fact that Manning was tortured in
retaliation for the leaks. That this is being treated like an afterthought,
with no indication of any accountability, illustrates how far we have
descended in such a short time. I hope Manning continues to speak out against
torture during his time in prison.

~~~
205guy
In the other article from WaPo about Manning sentencing, there was this quote:

"Manning will receive a credit of 1,293 days for the time he has been confined
prior to the sentence, including 112 days of credit for abusive treatment he
was subjected to in the brig at the Quantico Marine Base."[1]

The math isn't clear, but it seems to confirm he was somehow compensated for
the horrible treatment. I would call it psychological abuse, not sure if it
equates to torture. Given that it's a sort of admission of wrongdoing, I
suspect the days of credit were part of the plea deal--otherwise he'd be
persuing further actions over it.

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-
security/judge-...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-
security/judge-to-sentence-bradley-manning-
today/2013/08/20/85bee184-09d0-11e3-b87c-476db8ac34cd_story.html)

~~~
Bishizel
While solitary confinement isn't considered torture today, there are
psychologists who, after studying the effects of such confinement, have
started trying to get it labeled as a form of torture.

~~~
dalek_cannes
There are some levels of pain I would actually prefer over solitary
confinement.

Consider that more people kill themselves because they can't bear
psychological pain than they do because they can't bear physical pain.

~~~
ksrm
Isn't that because psychological pain is much more common?

~~~
Bishizel
I would think it's because, while physical pain readily heals, psychological
pain doesn't seem to heal nearly as effectively.

------
sam-mueller
FTA: _One might wish that President Obama could put up such a principled
defense for his scurrilous conduct in handing over the security of the
American people to secret courts and universal surveillance._

What exactly is Obama's defense? I know myself and others are extremely
disappointed in his direction, despite voting him in for a second term. Yet it
doesn't seem like he's made any attempt at justifying his direction. Does he
even feel obligated? Has he directly addressed the issues of his hypocritical
back-flopping on prosecuting whistleblowers, or blatant disregard to our
privacy rights? Is he just ignoring the backlash?

~~~
rayiner
Here's my hypothesis. Obama is thinking about the situation like a lawyer and
as a result he can't understand why there would be such a vociferous objection
now of all times.

As the recently declassified FISC opinion shows, most of the NSA program is
broadly within well-established law. Third-party doctrine means it's not
illegal to get data from third parties like Google or Facebook, and it's well-
accepted that 4th amendment protections don't apply to foreigners. The U.S.
has been surveilling foreigners for decades now, and has been gathering
records from third parties like banks, etc, for decades as well. The _legal_
nit to pick with the NSA's recent efforts seems to be that it's doing searches
on purely domestic communications that indadvertedly get caught in the nets
(though it also seems that the NSA isn't trying very hard to make the nets
finer). But you can't object to the very foundations of the program purely on
legal principles.

If you're looking at it from a legal point of view, it seems like a lot of
uproar over something that's bad, but not something that's bad down to its
foundations.

But to the digerati, it's a much bigger deal, and as someone who is not in
that group I think Obama can't appreciate that point of view. The idea of
getting e-mails from Google strikes a chord with many people in a way that the
idea of getting bank records from banks doesn't. The digerati oppose
electronic surveillance on principle, and don't care if analogous programs
have existed in other areas for decades.

Incidentally, I don't expect Obama, or old line politicians like Feinstein or
Pelosi to "get it" any time soon. This seems to be a "you either get it or you
don't" issue. Either you have a visceral aversion to the idea of electronic
surveillance or you don't. It's much more an emotional issue as anything else,
and Obama's not an emotional guy. He's also a big government liberal, so he
doesn't have any reason to oppose the NSA program on those grounds. He's got
the most aggressive foreign policy and national security policy of any
Democratic president since, well I don't even know who. He's the second-coming
of Reagan on that front. He has no reason to view this as anything other than
some NSA programs that stepped out of line and need to step back on the right
side of the line.

~~~
lukifer
I had been hoping that Obama's relative youth would put him closer to digerati
territory, but it would seem that we're not there yet, despite his legendary
social meda campaign and BlackBerry addiction. I think most people still think
about spying in terms of WW2 and spy movies: individual humans listening to
individual telephone calls of known targets. Obviously they don't have the
resources to care about your "personal life", so they're just hunting the
Worst of the Worst, right?

Only when one is savvy enough to understand that (a) a database never forgets,
and (b) a well-mined database never shuts up, does the real danger of these
programs become apparent.

...of course, there's also the possibility that Obama _does_ understand all of
this, either because he's somehow checkmated by the agencies and their
knowledge, or he's part of the club and genuinely believes in naked power. But
your theory is probably the most likely.

~~~
pkinsky
>Obviously they don't have the resources to care about your "personal life",
so they're just hunting the Worst of the Worst, right?

Even this argument is flawed, there are FBI documents showing they very much
cared about the personal life of noted communist agitator Martin Luther King.

------
grecy
Americans seriously need to band together and find a way to punish those
responsible for these crimes, not the people who are willing to risk their own
lives by disclosing the crimes happened.

Until you do, the legal system is a joke.

~~~
BetterLateThan
> Americans seriously need to band together

Not Americans - individuals. All wars and the state itself, which _is_ war,
are various manifestations of the same conflict: individuals vs the mob.

There are no Americans, gay, feminists, unemployed, disabled in this war.
There are no groups whose rights need to be protected more than those of
individuals. This war will continue as long as we appoint somebody who
promises the illusion of protection in exchange for our personal
responsibility.

There is nothing to lose, therefore nothing to fear, therefore nothing to
protect. Imagine this taught in schools instead of warrior worship sprinkled
with "because I said so".

~~~
Kequc
America the country is the thing causing these problems. Americans have more
control and more responsibility for that country than anyone else in the world
does. Everyone else belongs to another country they have to worry about, and
do worry about, more successfully on the whole. You're not seeing Italy firing
bombs at the Middle East right now.

~~~
mmphosis
I love Americans. Some of the behaviour of the United States government I am
not so sure about.

Of course the behaviour of governments in other countries can be just as
absurd. We are not so different. You're not seeing Italy firing bombs at the
Middle East right now. The stories are different, the absurd behaviour is much
the same. [http://www.beppegrillo.it/en/](http://www.beppegrillo.it/en/)

------
jusben1369
Philosophically this is always on really shaky ground. Those that strongly
support Manning's actions are saying "We want to live in a nation of laws.
However, if an individual believes those laws to be unjust or unfair, _based
solely on his determination_ , then he should be free to ignore those laws and
act as he sees fit. He should not be punished" That's a pretty open ended
precedent to set. There is absolutely no doubt that people die in the US every
year who would not die in say a Western European country because of the
choices this country makes around the role of government in helping the sick,
the poor and the old. Is someone free to break the laws and put lives at risk
in the name of rebelling against the injustice of those who die or suffer when
we have the resources to ensure they don't? That's why even if Bradley is
right he's wrong. And btw I have so much respect for the fact he is getting
1/10th of the coverage of Snowden but may actually be more worthy if anything
of attention.

~~~
precisioncoder
That's not the situation. He exposed the fact that the US Military was
breaking the law. Thus whistle-blowing. There are laws protecting him and he
is still being punished.

------
scoofy
This is actually a very nice sentiment. Unfortunately, given the jadedness
i've aquired over the last few years have convinced me that it will do little
good for his freedom.

I only hope that, as demographics in america swing younger, the libertarians
and progressives can put put aside our differences and get this guy a pardon
down the road. Scooter Libby is free and Manning is in jail.

~~~
jmaygarden
Scooter Libby was charged for obstructing an investigation. He didn't leak any
secrets. I don't see the connection.

~~~
j2d3
I thought he exposed the identity of an undercover CIA agent. That seems like
a fact that was supposed to be secret, which he leaked (supposedly.)

~~~
j2d3
You're right, he was convicted of obstructing the investigation about how
Valerie Plame's identity was leaked... so it's not fair to say that he leaked
it himself. He just protected Dick Cheney, who - semantics aside - was likely
the actual leaker (in terms of responsibility for the leak and directing that
the leak occur).

------
jlmorton
I would have a much easier time supporting Manning if he did as Snowden did,
and turned over select documents to a reputable media organization.

Manning is white-washing his actions a bit here. He doesn't mention divulging
years worth of diplomatic cables, including cables with countries uninvolved
in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he divulged them en masse, without
regard for their content.

~~~
redthrowaway
>I would have a much easier time supporting Manning if he did as Snowden did,
and turned over select documents to a reputable media organization.

Define reputable. If his objective were to have talking heads bicker about it
on CNN, then handing it over to WaPo or NYT would have been well-advised. If,
on the other hand, he wanted real people to have access to the information so
they could participate in an informed debate (which is what he said he
wanted), then those outlets would have been a terrible place to go. Wikileaks
could at least guarantee that the material would reach the public unaltered;
the MSM could not.

~~~
streptomycin
Also, it might not have even gotten to the level of talking heads. It could
have been covered up. Assange said that WaPo had the Collateral Murder video
for a year before WikiLeaks did, although WaPo has denied that.

------
RyanMcGreal
Bradley Manning is not a criminal. He's a prisoner of conscience.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_of_conscience](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_of_conscience)

~~~
dmerrick
I was unfamiliar with this term. That was a very interesting article.

------
drderidder
How many Americans died fighting to protect their country's ideals of freedom?
When I hear about the "War on Terror", the TSA, the NSA, police
militarization, etc. I wonder... "Is this the freedom they died to save?"

------
joshfraser
This guy has spent 3 years in solitary confinement and is facing 35 more in
the brig. And yet has the courage and clarity of mind to explain why he did
what he did and say he will "gladly pay that price". Astounding.

------
slg
Does anyone else see the irony in this statement? Manning's defense in this
argument is almost the exact thing he was supposedly rebelling against. The
most glaring example is on one hand he says patriotism was used as the
justification for many horrific actions and on the other he says he broke the
law, disclosed classified information, and endangered others due to his own
love of country.

~~~
Jormundir
What don't you understand? Patriotism was the path of committing atrocious
acts, so he did "unpatriotic" things in the eyes of those in power, who were
manipulating patriotism to align it with their terrible actions.

~~~
slg
_" 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."_

He explains away his actions as an act of patriotism. He acknowledges the laws
were broken and lives were endangered in order to accomplish his goals, but he
acted anyway out of love for country. That sounds like similar logic that
could be used to explain a lot of the action he revealed.

~~~
bandushrew
Absolutely the same logic could be used to explain the actions he revealed,
that is exactly the problem.

We are being forced to choose between realities. Either his action is a noble
one born of patriotism, or those that he revealed are.

Both sides are claiming to be right, noble and patriotic, and both sides see
themselves as acting appropriately.

The question is which reality do we want to be true? which side do we want to
be associated with and to support?

Pick your side, and see where that decision takes you.

There are no objective realities here. Just a personal decision regarding the
reality we wish to support, encourage and stand with.

~~~
pigscantfly
Well, I'm not going to side with the people who gunned down a Reuters
journalist from their Apache and the military who tried to cover for them over
the person who outed their conduct. I guess you can choose which way your
patriotism swings, but it seems like a fairly obvious conclusion to me.

~~~
slg
To be fair you are taking the worst action of one entity and comparing it with
the best action of the other. I don't think many people here would say what
happened in the Collateral Murder video was justifiable or disagree with the
motive Manning had in leaking it. The problem is that is just a piece of the
picture. Manning released a lot more information and some of it endangered
innocent people. He basically put innocent people in life threatening
situations to expose that innocent people had previously been killed.

------
secstate
I just wonder what city will arise as the capital of the Eastern American
Empire. How long did the Roman Empire last after the split? 80 years (395-476,
give or take). Yeah, I don't expect to live that long, but it's going to be
rough downfall.

Hopefully we can create some kind of planetary federation to keep a lid on
this privacy/freedom shit before it gets too out of hand.

It kills me that Joss wrote one of the better "tree of liberty" quotes in
recent memory ... maybe that's just where we're at as a culture:

"Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another
world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll
swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not
hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave."

------
supercanuck
Foreign Policy magazine stated that the Manning leaks was a catalyst for the
revolutions in Tunisia which triggered the Arab Spring. It may not have been
good for the US, but it was good for the world. Democracy spread to two arab
countries.

------
graycat
Poor guy; I take his statement at face value.

But, he's misled: In simplest terms, "War is hell.", and this is not news.
Germany bombed London and killed mostly civilians. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor,
and civilians were a large fraction of the deaths. The US fire bombed Japan
and killed maybe 80,000 civilians in one night and did that on many nights.
The two atom bombs killed many more civilians. The US and England bombed
German cities and created horrific conditions for mostly civilians (although
often war production workers) maybe best addressed just by hoping that the
deaths came quickly, which no doubt often they didn't. Germany attacked to the
East all the way to Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad and likely killed many
more civilians than soldiers. Did I mention that "Was is hell"? It is.

In Iraq, a civil war was going on, and the US, to its credit, eventually
stopped it, but while it was going on no doubt many Iraqis did all they could
to kill other Iraqis, and civilians got caught in the crossfire.

Gitmo? Of course there is "due process", as defined and executed by the US DoD
but, right, not as in the US criminal justice system. We treated them as
prisoners of war out of uniform or some such. That's the form of "due process"
they get from the US DoD fighting a war. Did we follow some statements of the
UN? Maybe not, but the UN wasn't fighting the war, either. As prisoners of
war, in many ways they are very well treated. If the US were to let them go,
then a significant fraction of them would attack the US again. Last I read,
it's costing the US $1 million per prisoner per year -- we are being very
generous.

The poor guy just is not looking at reality.

~~~
simoncion
Gitmo?

We _tortured_ those poor SoBs. We _never_ torture PoWs. You know why? So that
we _have_ a reputation of never torturing PoWs, so that when our soldiers are
captured, they stand a good chance of _also_ not being tortured. That
reputation has been obliterated, and for what, exactly? What accurate,
actionable intelligence ever came from Gitmo? We have put our soldiers in
_very_ _real_ danger for absolutely no gain whatsoever.

I hope to hell whatever _real_ power we end up tangled with next can overlook
our crimes and summon the basic human decency to treat its captured American
soldiers with decency and respect.

~~~
graycat
Yes, you have a point.

But, the standards have long been that easily a PoWs life can be so bad that
maybe usually there will be little difference. Consider what the USSR did to
German prisoners -- marched off to Siberia or some such and never heard from
again. North Korea did to US prisoners in the Korean War? What North Viet Nam
did to Senator McCain?

And our torture was water boarding, cold rooms, loud music?

Your "decency and respect" are asking a bit much. Did I mention, "War is
hell"?

Supposedly at times prisoner interrogation can yield quite useful results, but
you may be correct that from Gitmo we didn't get much (at least that we didn't
already have).

But there is such a thing as a _dumb ass clusterfuck_ , or the older FUBAR or
SNAFU, and there's been a lot of that since 9/11.

More narrowly we elected W, and with 9/11 he and Cheney seemed to get all
super-hyper concerned about their oaths of office to "protect and defend the
US", paid a bit too much attention to _threat scenarios_ of Saddam putting a
nuke in a cargo ship, sending it to a major US port city, and setting it off,
etc. Yes, it was a difficult threat to evaluate -- small risk of a big loss.

As we know now, Saddam was talking about WMDs mostly to scare his own people
and neighbors, and our intelligence was so poor we didn't know better.

So, W/Cheney convinced themselves that Saddam, definitely a bloody thug,
following Stalin, was a threat to the US and that the US should invade and
occupy Iraq and set up a democratic government and could do so quickly for
maybe $60 billion. The guy who said $120 billion or some such got fired. The
guy who said we'd need 500,000 troops to occupy the country got fired.

Did I mention clusterfuck, FUBAR, SNAFU? Saddam had told us that it would be
tough to hold the country together. We didn't listen and, instead, ignited
essentially a several sided civil war. By the time we put down the civil war,
likely more Iraqis had died a violent death, from us and/or other Iraqis, per
month and in total than at any time under Saddam. We killed, what, 5000+ US
soldiers? Seriously injured, what, 50,000+, 100,000+? Blew, what, net present
value $3 trillion? SNAFU? FUBAR?

There was a lot of really sick violence. E.g., when an angry Shiite captured a
Sunni or an angry Kurd captured a Shiite, or an angry Sunni captured a Kurd,
etc. new chapters in torture could be drafted. And several US workers where
strung up from a bridge.

So Manning didn't t like it. Easy enough to understand -- I didn't like it,
either.

But, W/Cheney were elected, about as fairly as the US can manage. Of really
high importance, the US Congress authorized Gulf War II and appropriated the
money for it. And the result was a _bloody mess_ : The people really badly
injured were the lucky ones because they died quickly and, thus, didn't suffer
as much before they died.

But, that was reality. It's not too difficult to see just why it happened.
It's clearly what is likely to happen in many situations of military action
and US national security. It's not really a big surprise. I'm sorry reality is
like that, but in this universe, in this solar system, on this planet, now,
that's the case. Heck, there were bloody battles in the US Civil War, Medieval
wars, Roman wars, etc. There's been plenty of torture, as I recall, by some
Spanish Roman Catholics. Again, the lucky ones were the ones who died quickly.
Death? There's been a lot of that. Ugly? Once I was reading the Bible and got
to where the pregnant women were cut open, threw the book across the room, and
have not opened it again since then.

For W/Cheney, as far as I can tell, they were superficial, simplistic, simple-
minded, silly, sloppy, stupid, etc. and put in less thought and planning than
needed for a good Sunday BBQ.

The thing for a person to do is to try to stay out of the way of such a huge
disaster. That's what Manning should have done.

More generally all US mainstream media and all US voters should clearly
understand that when a politician starts talking passionately about
"protecting the US" (translation: covering his ass so that if something
happens don't blame him) and US military action in foreign lands, firing
experts with skeptical estimates, "to spread democracy, freedom, and
prosperity", see a big chance of throwing away a lot of US blood and treasure,
ugly, violent deaths of a lot of people "over there", and a really big
clusterfuck, FUBAR, SNAFU.

Track record: Korean war, mixed. Viet Nam war, total SNAFU, accomplished
essentially nothing good. Gulf War I, pushed Saddam out of Kuwait quickly and
relatively cleanly. Gulf War II, total clusterfuck and will likely result in
just a Saddam II in Baghdad. Afghanistan, smaller scale clusterfuck,
essentially nothing good. Syria, seed of a total clusterfuck -- just add
military aid. Egypt, the US supplies the Egyptian military, and they keep down
the radical Islamists, don't attack Israel very much, and keep the Suez canal
open.

It's mixed.

~~~
simoncion
_We_ don't torture PoWs. _We_ know that information obtained from torture is
-at best- unreliable, and more typically is whatever the tortured feels will
make the torturer stop torturing.

Comparing American torture to Korean or Russian torture is not the point. (The
misbehavior of other countries doesn't excuse the misbehavior of ours.) The
point is that, as a matter of policy, we _do_ _not_ _torture_ because it
doesn't provide usable information, and it gives enemies more reason to
torture our troops when they capture them.

I carefully read the remainder of your reply. While I agree with one of your
over-arching points (poorly lead large organizations in chaotic situations
often produce sub-standard results), I don't see how the remainder of your
reply relates to my condemnation of and furious anger toward those who
destroyed our reputation as a country that humanely handles PoWs by ignoring
centuries of history and research.

------
DigitalSea
If there is one lesson we can all take from this it is: No matter how cruel or
wrong the actions of your Government are, they are always right even when they
are wrong. Democracy? I think not.

------
chernevik
[text deleted]

At some point, I will learn that HN is not the place for intelligent
expression of political expression divergent from its denizens' norms.

My bad.

~~~
burntsushi
I can be snooty too.

At some point, I will learn that many people just aren't capable of pulling
the blinders off and realizing that killing thousands of innocent people every
year without any sort of accountability is just complete lunacy.

Honestly, it seems like your definition of "intelligent" is "middle of the
mainstream road." I can't really see how that holds up to tell you the truth.

~~~
chernevik
You assume that all consciences will reach the same conclusion as yours. They
don't. They haven't.

A military "accountability" of individual conscience would essentially be a
reversion to feudalism, with armed power first migrating to leaders based on
visions of conscience, then deteriorating to coalitions of interest. And now
you're back at "might makes right" but without any ethic to get you out.

Even granting we are killing thousands of innocents without accountability,
Manning's statement is not a safe way out.

~~~
burntsushi
> You assume that all consciences will reach the same conclusion as yours.
> They don't. They haven't.

That was my point. I was returning the undue egoism.

> And now you're back at "might makes right" but without any ethic to get you
> out.

That's where we are right now. It's the definition of democracy (close enough
to republican government for the pedants).

> Even granting we are killing thousands of innocents without accountability,
> Manning's statement is not a safe way out.

Anything that reduces our imperialistic tendencies is safer than allowing the
imperialistic tendencies to grow. To throw it back at you: might _doesn 't_
make right.

