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Below is my appearance on HuffPost Live on Thursday night just after Bradley Manning’s latest motion hearing wrapped. Host Alyona Minkovski intereviewed me and primarily we discussed the decision by Manning to submit a plea notice, where he pleaded by exceptions and substitutions.
Other stories on the latest in Bradley Manning’s case: here’s one I wrote up on the military colonel, who served as the Special Court Martial Convening Authority, and setup the sanity board that reviewed Manning’s mental state so it would not be covered by the media. Here are the live blogs for Day 1 and Day 2 of Manning’s latest hearing on whether his speedy trial rights had been violated.
7 Comments
Thanks for the explanation, Kevin.
yeah, thanks… I still think Manning needed to get punished in some way… but considering Obama claims to be so transparent… the case should be getting handled very differently at this point (and all along)… with heads rolling elsewhere in the USG… specifically the bozo’s who use classifications as cover for gossip.
Thanks Kevin, interesting gen. betrayus walks away and Pfc Manning well not so much. Justice in the new Amerika.
Any other lower level officer would be facing punishment for showing emails to a person unauthorized to see them. His emails were likely marked with some level of classification. I know from covering Manning that military prosecutors in this case have to set their emails to unclassified otherwise they are sent with classified marking.
Book Salon up with Sheldon Krimsky and Tania Simoncelli’s Genetic Justice: DNA Data Banks, Criminal Investigations, and Civil Liberties hosted by Gabe Rottman
Let’s be clear here: If Bradley Manning copped to jaywalking, the DOD would somehow figure out how to make that a capital offense. When I was young, what he did was considered “journalism”. I have yet to hear a satisfactory explanation of the difference between Bradley Manning and Daniel Ellsberg.
This is what a defendant would do in conjunction with a plea deal, reached in conjunction with prosecutors. If that’s not the case, then it’s just giving the prosecution a free ride, otherwise they would have to prove the facts stipulated beyond a reasonable doubt. I’m not a huge believer in educating the prosecution, so I hope that the former is the case, that a plea deal has been reached.
As for Assange, it was Manning’s duty to protect the classified information from disclosure, not Assange’s duty to not seek it. As a foreign national, it is debatable whether Assange has any duty towards the US government.
Some of the information in the Collateral Murder video depicts war crimes (shooting wounded enemy personnel, defiling their bodies, shooting noncombatants) proscribed by the Geneva Convention to which both Iraq and the US are signatories and therefore bound. Manning may have had a duty to show this information to his chain of command, and if his chain of command gave him the brush-off, he may have had a duty to expose this information to the International Criminal Court or other higher authority and may have chosen WL to do so. Assange may also have had this duty, or at least the right to make this information public.