The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    The Bradley Manning Video

    By David Seaton on Tue, 05/31/2011 - 6:01am |

    This video raises many, many issues... but the most significant thing is how somebody like this was ever kept in the army in the first place and then was sent to Iraq and then given the access to the classified information he was given access to.

    This is very, very strange... This is NOT about Bradley Manning, this is about the US Army. The US Army is supposed to be the "greatest" army in history, certainly the most expensive one in history... what the hell is going on?

    Comments

    He looks like the kid from A Christmas Story. Maybe Assange double-dog-dared him to leak all that information.


    by Donal on Tue, 05/31/2011 - 7:41am

    I find it utterly tragic that the only way that a person as potentially valuable in an information economy as Bradley Manning could ever hope to go to university was to enlist in the army... as if Shirley Temple had to join the Marine Corp in order to get dental care

    The whole thing is so amazing... It's not that he is gay, gays come in all shapes and sizes, but he is like a little girl. He is blond, blue eyed, about five-nothing tall and practically floats. In an overtly homosexual and violent environment like a prison, he would probably become the "punk" of the most alpha-male doing life and just "keep house" for him and never have to worry about violence or humilliation, but in the "don't ask, don't tell" environment of this weird army, hypocrisy meets sadism bathed in incompetent stupidity... When you get this far into the story, you are not really surprised to find that the passwords to highly classified material are written on post-its and stuck on the computer screens.

    Manning's best defense would be temporary insanity and the people who admitted him and kept him the army should be court marshaled. There should be a congressional investigation into the whole thing.


    by David Seaton on Tue, 05/31/2011 - 11:18am

    What the hell is going on you ask?

    Pretty simple.  Our very expensive, best in history army is rife with incompetence, lacking in real leadership and is a fundamentally unsound and unstable, but vast bureaucratic organization.  The needs of the organization in the moment always trump good common sense and rational decision making.  This is, after all, an organization devoted to killing.

    If Manning was as emotionally unstable as indicated here then it's clear whatever he may have done to breach security is less his "fault" than it is that of the army that insisted on keeping him in a position where he might do harm to himself and to others as well as the army itself.


    by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 06/01/2011 - 4:50pm

    You've summed it up pretty well.


    by David Seaton on Thu, 06/02/2011 - 1:42am

    Dunno if you watched the crap Frontline hit-piece WikiSecrets, or if you would have seen it as 'fair and balanced given your stridency about Julian Assange, but Somebody Didn't Like it!


    by we are stardust on Wed, 06/01/2011 - 5:48pm

    I think the entire business is filled with intensely manipulative people.... and one intensely manipulated person... Bradley Manning... who is the only one carrying the can.


    by David Seaton on Thu, 06/02/2011 - 1:45am