Fine, Here Is Your Wonkpinion On The Bradley Manning Verdict

 
 An Army judge has found Private First Class Bradley Manning guilty on most charges relating to espionage, in his release of classified information to Wikileaks. Manning was found not guilty on the biggest charge, "aiding the enemy," which could have put him in prison for life without parole. It's probably about the best he could have hoped for, considering the number of highly placed people who really want someone, anyone, executed for treason, please.

A thoroughly unscientific sampling of opinion in the Wonkette Editorial Chatcave went something like this when the news of the guilty verdicts came down:

Editrix: So we should probly do something on that, huh? Does anybody have any thoughts on Manning?

Snipy: OK, I know I might get piled on here but he did do the espionage. You can talk more meta about whether information should be free, etc., but stealing America stuff and giving it away is espionage.

Gary L: Actually agree with you, Snipy

Dok Z: Me too

Kaili Joy G: Same (we are all going on Glenn Greenwald's naughty list)

Dok Z: OK, so we piled on... WITH HUGS!

Gary L: But the NSA will read this and send us all lollipops, so it balances out

Snipy: THANKS OBAMA

And then Kris Benson reminded us that Manning also spent a year in solitary, much of it naked and being pretty much tortured, and we all agreed THAT sucked and was totally NOT COOL of course. And then we all agreed that the government classifies way too much stuff as Top Secret when in fact it's merely Highly Embarrassing, like a lot of the diplomatic gossip that Manning released. Kris offered a sidebar on the pretty crappy security that allowed a PFC with a blank CD to download a metric shit-ton of secrets, Gary said, yeah, but Manning is responsible for actually stealing it, and names weren't redacted, and that is a problem, too. Snipy added that FOIA is broken almost beyond repair, and then EVERYONE breathed a sigh of relief when the Twitters passed along the news that Manning had been cleared on the most serious charge. We all agreed that we should definitely write something about the verdict, and then everybody left for their "jobs" except Yr Doktor Zoom, who was already at his.

And so while we were trying to find an image of Manning that wasn't from the pay-us-big-monies agencies, we found this still from the very first Wikileak leak, that "Collateral Murder" video, of a helicopter attack in Baghdad:

And that sort of refueled our rage tanks toward the whole Iraq fuck-tussle and reminded us that even though there's plenty to quibble about in the way that Wikileaks operated, or Julian Assange's drama-queen tendencies, Bradley Manning's leak of those helicopter gunship videos, all by itself, was a Pentagon Papers level of civil disobedience, and well worth going to prison for. (Manning was acquitted on one count of espionage for leaking video of a different airstrike, in Afghanistan, but not this one.)

So there you go! Some Obamatard "nuance" because we love Obama and we hate solitary confinement and our collective opinions on drones range from "don't really care that much" to "hate 'em but not enough to go lie down on a runway in front of them" to "meh. liked them better before they sold out." And we are all tired, so very tired, of this Administration's stiffy for state secrets and overcharging the shit out of people. We will say this: Manning seems a hell of a lot more noble whistleblower than that Snowden punk, who is all like wah wah wah I live in an airport feel sorry for meeeeee.

[ WaPo ]