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Chelsea Manning, the transgender Army private convicted of leaking national security secrets, faces a hearing Tuesday for prison infractions that could result in solitary confinement.
Manning, who was intelligence analyst Bradley Manning when arrested in 2010, is charged with disrespect of a prison officer and is accused having books and magazines including Vanity Fair and Cosmopolitan, among other offenses.
Noteable from the article, it is apparently "disrespect of an officer" to request a lawyer.
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Chelsea Manning Faces Solitary Confinement
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Hacking's just another word for nothing left to kludge.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday August 14 2015, @03:40PM
The information Chelsea Manning provided to Wikileaks kicked off the Arab Spring, which has deposed entrenched dictators from Tunis to the Persian Gulf. Do you consider that to be a bad thing? Or is it that the US govt can do no wrong in your eyes?
Quite often it seems that those who condemn Manning also condemn Snowden. You may not be one such, but perhaps you can give insight into why you consider Manning's actions treachery, and why one might consider Snowden also guilty of that. I cannot understand it, myself, since exposing government crimes and coverups represents to me the highest expression of patriotism and the sacred calling of every person who wants to consider himself free in this world.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 14 2015, @04:06PM
Insight? I'll try to explain it.
Snowden exposed obvious wrongs - moral, ethical, and legal - committed by the government against common citizens. Snowden was not a soldier when he exposed these wrongs, meaning that he had no chain of command such as Manning had. He did not betray brothers in arms. Snowden released verifiable facts.
Manning, on the other hand, used his "gender confused" status as a weapon against his brothers in arms. He was a discipline problem for a long time before turning traitor. Manning actually assaulted a senior NCO on at least one occassion, and threatened that NCO and others on multiple occassions.
Manning betrayed his brothers in arms. Outright betrayal - his reasons for stealing and disseminating that data included REVENGE against his brothers in arms.
More - much of Mannings shit has been filtered so as to cast relatively innocent people as evil, and to cast less innocent people as even more evil.
That collateral damage video - you've watched it? I'll presume that you have. Did you get the background on that video? No, the chopper crew DID NOT target some random bunch of people, one of whom had a camera. Let's backtrack some months - Reuters intentionally EMBEDDED reporters with combat units fighting in opposition to the US. That's right, embedded reporters, attached to a combat unit, in an attempt to get the scoop that no one else can get.
Our camera crew was actively reporting on an enemy combat unit. Got that?
Just several minutes (that is, less than half an hour) prior to this encounter, US troops on the ground had taken fire from this position. That enemy unit was firing on our soldiers. Combatant units, firing on combatant units - that's how war goes. People are shooting at each other. I have no great animus toward those soldiers killed in the video - they are enemies, but they are doing what enemies are suppposed to do.
So - our ground troops take some fire, they call in air support, air support identifies enemies on the ground with weapons, and opens fire.
DID YOU COUNT THE WEAPONS VISIBLE IN THE VIDEO? I challenge. They are easy to miss. They are difficult to pick out, due to the poor quality of the video. But, you can count five - that is, NO LESS THAN FIVE AK-47 combat rifles in the video.
The camera? Yes, it was indeed mis-identified as a rocket launcher. Perhaps if it had been identified correctly, things would have ended differently. Perhaps - and then again, perhaps not. An enemy combatant unit had been located and identified - the chopper was fully justified in blowing the enemy into eternity.
That sucks - but that's war. That's been the rules for millenia. The Geneva Conventions support those rules.
The van? That was the real shits. The guys in the air couldn't know who was in the van. All that they saw, was that a potential enemy vehicle was rendering assistance to known, identified enemies on the ground. It really, really, REALLY sucked that the occupants of the van included innocent children. Perhaps the adults were also innocent, we can't know at this point. One of those adulst DID TOUCH a weapon at one point. That was unfortunate, because that only increases the chopper crew's readiness to fire.
Bradley stole and released that video, knowing full well that few civilians would understand what they were watching in that video. He released that video to embarrass the army which he had betrayed.
One more time - Snowden is a hero, but Manning is just some prison bitch. Manning is right where he belongs.
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday August 14 2015, @04:54PM
Thank you for the explanation. This is much more informative.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @05:48PM
All he's done is regurgitate the Army's own self-exoneration of those events. [turner.com] Don't be so quick to accept it as it were an impartial evaluation or even runaway's own analysis, its the same organization with a history of white-washing cases like abu graib.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 14 2015, @06:05PM
Listen to the radio chatter in the video. I've "regurgitated" nothing. Pretty much everything I've stated here is stated in the video. The only thing NOT addressed in the video, is the embedded status of the reporter on the ground.
What's more - you can view the video yourself. Count the men on the ground. Count the weapons. Some have claimed that they see more than the five weapons I count. I'm not real sure - I've counted up to eight, but then, reconsidered that maybe I had already counted some from a different angle. I'm not real sure how many weapons, but there are NO LESS than five. Count the men again. One camera man, with no weapon. One reporter, with no weapon. How many more men? Each man seems to have a weapon. Kinda what you might expect from a combatant unit looking for action, right?
I think you're the one regurgitating nonsense.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Saturday August 15 2015, @01:39AM
Are you purposely misunderstanding the issue? Shooting the wrong armed men is what lost the USA any moral standing in Somalia, though most of the men were unarmed in any case and making no obvious hostile action. The official excuse made at the time was that the cameras were misidentified as RPGs, so obviously the AK's weren't seen as a legitimate explanation although maybe later it worked for Fox when talking to people clueless about the context.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 15 2015, @02:18AM
"clueless about the context"
May I ask how many battlefields you have seen, up close and personal? Context. I have serious issues with the government that decided to invade Iraq in the first place - but the grunts who went over there and fought the war? I have few issues with the grunts. I have zero issues with the deaths of the reporters in this video. (For the record, I have issues with the CIA and intel, and the way a certain POW prison was run.) Wrong place, at the wrong time. Embedded in an enemy unit, so when that enemy unit is destroyed, oh well - sucks to be embedded, doesn't it?
Context. You should find some clues yourself.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Saturday August 15 2015, @05:39AM
I live in an Australian army town with friends who've done their time. One guy (a veteran of Somalia) told me how some US soldiers put a heavy machinegun in the middle of an intersection so they could get around the rules of engagement. They shot the guys moving it out of the way because they were "in control of a heavy weapon". I also somehow ended up playing music with a Somali guy (an ex translator for the US forces) - he had to leave Somalia after the US lost the moral high ground as he was associated with them. Another veteran friend (this time from Afghanistan) said with pride that when a truckload of armed guys drove out to attack his convoy (stationary due to a breakdown) he stepped out, let them see him aim, and saw them off without a shot being fired. The Americans in the convoy yelled at him for not firing, and he simply couldn't believe they were so shortsighted.
There's something seriously wrong with the US armed forces culture - these wars keep being lost because populations turn against them. “Moral courage deserts a man the moment he puts on a uniform"... wrong WAS done here. Maybe the military is just sore they were shown up as such moral cowards by a transvestite.
(Score: 1) by kryptonianjorel on Saturday August 15 2015, @07:39AM
Chelsea Manning is Transgendered, not a transvestite
(Score: 2) by Pav on Saturday August 15 2015, @01:11PM
Thanks for pointing that out... I have more soldier friends than transgendered friends, or so it seems.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 15 2015, @01:20PM
"in control of a heavy weapon"
Was this incident ever reported any higher up the chain of command than a squad sergeant? You know, and I know, that no military is ever going to approve of such an action. The risk would be, that a stronger force than expected shows up to take the weapon. In such a case, the officer or NCO who approved the plan would be guilty of aiding and abbetting the enemy by supplying them with heavy weapons. That doesn't even begin to address the moral issues of the situation.
Something tells me this is one of those stories some guy made up, and it got passed around and around and around.
On the other hand, it COULD just be true, if there was a CIA agent in charge . . .
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2015, @05:06AM
This is an opinion.
This is presenting something as fact that hasn't been established in what is commonly agreed to be a fair trial.
Should we go on a bit further? You basically write "TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR!"
You take the position that Manning is a traitor, and therefore is a traitor.
How about you do us all a favour, and re-enlist, that way we won't have to hear you say "TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR" until you feel we're all convinced.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2015, @06:50AM
but he didn't. as much as i'd like to support manning on his crusade, there may be some things we aren't seeing.
read his comments again, his outbursts of traitor are mostly emotional, but he does provide some solid arguments for it (unfortunate that he didn't have any supporting links for it though)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @04:24PM
Well, maybe, if you want to go back and try to arbitrarily assign cause/effect. However, others will point out that the whole overthrowing Iraq/Hussein was Wolfowitz's strategy to kick off an Arab democratic uprising. Once democracy was installed in Iraq, the other middle east countries would fall one by one into democratic governments. So why do you consider the Iraq war a bad thing? Do you really support those entrenched dictators that much?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @09:43PM
So why do you consider the Iraq war a bad thing?
Because playing world police is unjust and the ends don't justify the means. And the results speak for themselves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 14 2015, @04:54PM
I need to add one thing to my previous post. I mentioned that I had no real animus toward the enemy combatants. I failed to say that I have respect for the camera crew. Those boys went into combat situations, unarmed. Or, rather, armed only with a camera, pens, and pencils. Both the reporter and the cameraman were apparently quite dedicated to their profession. They deserve respect, and it is sad that like others before them, they paid th e ultimate price for taking the risk.
Rest in peace, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. Salutes.