

Early Struggles of Soldier Charged in WikiLeaks Case - donohoe
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/us/09manning.html?src=twr

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bugsy
Interesting article about his background but it avoids the big issue.

Secretly selling state secrets to enemies of one's country is treason. So is
giving the secrets away to those enemies, to advance their cause.

However, this is 100% totally different from revealing war crimes to
journalists who then publicly reveal the information. Revealing war crimes and
refusing unlawful orders is a sworn duty of all soldiers, and a moral duty. It
is lawful, however that does not stop criminal states who commit war crimes
from punishing, imprisoning, torturing and killing the heroes who risk their
own lives to reveal the truth of crimes against humanity that are illegally
and immorally being committed by the state. This soldier is a hero and a
martyr. The state is proving itself the enemy in this case, and it is an enemy
of the people. In this case, it was not treason but patriotism. It is the
state who has committed treason because war crimes are treason against the
people.

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Locke1689
Uh, I actually have yet to see anyone mention treason charges. Right now I
think he's being charged with unauthorized access to classified information
and unauthorized release of classified information. I think both of those are,
at the least, legally justified.

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MindTwister
"Uh, I actually have yet to see anyone mention treason charges. Right now I
think he's being charged with unauthorized access to classified information
and unauthorized release of classified information. I think both of those are,
at the least, legally justified."

Potato potato

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aaronbrethorst
Interesting speculation that DADT led him to disclose military secrets. That
is, of course, not to defend the leaking of information that has undoubtedly
killed Afghan informants, but fascinating nonetheless.

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paradoja
> information that has undoubtedly killed Afghan informants [Citation needed]

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aaronbrethorst
It's been two weeks since this was published:
[http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:BT-
CO-20100729-7038...](http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:BT-
CO-20100729-703851.html)

I think it's realistic to imagine Afghans have died in the past two weeks as a
result of the leak.

