Procrustes Stretched
Dante's Manifesto
Pvt. Bradley Manning: Cool | Fool | Tool
How do you see Pvt. Manning. a tool, a fool, cool, or a combination of these?
Sitting at the defence bench in a hushed courtroom, Manning said he was sickened by the apparent "bloodlust" of a helicopter crew involved in an attack on a group in Baghdad that turned out to include Reuters correspondents and children.
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Manning said: "We were obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists and ignoring goals and missions. I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general [that] might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counter-terrorism while ignoring the human situation of the people we engaged with every day."
How do you see Pvt. Manning. a tool, a fool, cool, or a combination of these?
Sitting at the defence bench in a hushed courtroom, Manning said he was sickened by the apparent "bloodlust" of a helicopter crew involved in an attack on a group in Baghdad that turned out to include Reuters correspondents and children.
...
Manning said: "We were obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists and ignoring goals and missions. I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general [that] might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counter-terrorism while ignoring the human situation of the people we engaged with every day."
JUDY WOODRUFF: Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private who is charged with leaking massive amounts of classified material to the Web site WikiLeaks, entered guilty pleas today.
He pleaded guilty to 10 of the 22 charges against him, admitting to violating military regulations, but not federal espionage laws. Manning spoke for more than an hour in the military courtroom, explaining his reasons for leaking classified information.
He said -- quote -- "I believe that if the general public had access to the information, this could spark a domestic debate as to the role of the military and foreign policy in general." He added -- quote -- "I felt I accomplished something that would allow me to have a clear conscience."
Later in the day, the judge accepted Manning's pleas. He still faces trial on the remaining charges.
For more now on Manning's statement, his pleas and what comes next, we are joined by Charlie Savage of The New York Times, who was in the courtroom today, and Arun Rath, who has been covering the Manning case for PBS' FRONTLINE.
Bradley Manning Leaked Classified Documents to Spark 'Debate' on Foreign Policy | PBS NewsHour | Feb. 28, 2013 | PBS
Bradley Manning, the solider accused of the biggest unauthorised disclosure of state secrets in US history, has pleaded guilty to being the source of the leak, telling a military court that he passed the information to a whistleblowing website because he believed the American people had a right to know the "true costs of war".
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In a highly unusual move for a defendant in such a serious criminal prosecution, Manning pleaded guilty to 10 lesser charges out of his own volition – not as part of a plea bargain with the prosecution. He admitted to having possessed and willfully communicated to an unauthorised person – probably Julian Assange – all the main elements of the WikiLeaks disclosure.
That covered the so-called "Collateral Murder" video of an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq; some US diplomatic cables including one of the early WikiLeaks publications the Reykjavik cable; portions of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs; some of the files on detainees in Guantánamo; and two intelligence memos.
Manning plea statement: Americans had a right to know 'true cost of war' | World news | The Guardian
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