Manning was 'illegally punished', will get 112 days lopped off any sentence US Army private Bradley Manning, who is accused of "aiding the enemy" by allegedly handing over classified Army documents to Wikileaks, will get 112 days cut from any prison sentence he could get if he's convicted on the charges. This is after a military judge ruled that Manning had been "illegally punished" in a Marine Corps …
Amen brother. So lets see the US military is using money lent from China to keep evil 13th century f__ks from throwing acid in the face of little girls going to school in a country where they are not wanted all the while the homeland is running out of money and needing some national building itself. Whats so complicated lol?
Not in the sense of the trial but in what he was trying to achieve. He sure as hell didn't leak all that information "for the lulz" as most hackers are wont to do. He leaked it to try and get the military to be more open with its mistakes.
Now however, no-one in possession of a full set of marbles will try to leak military detail in future. "See that guy we locked up without trial and subjected to inhumane conditions? That's exactly what you'll get if you try and do what he did."
All the stuff about the trial is merely paperwork. The mesage has been made loud and clear.
Military details consisted of messages from US embassies that revealed:
Pakistan might not be completely on our side helpful in dealing with muslim terrorists
Putin wields some power over the president in Russia
Israel might not be entirely sincere in seeking a political settlement with the Palestinians.
>you just equip anybody with a gun and let them shoot who they feel like, don't you
Thats the NRA's and their main financial backers the gun maker industry wet dream and sadly Florida and other states already have this with the stand your ground laws. Funny another place also has this called Somalia and in general its not a real nice place.
@asdf - That is a completely dishonest misrepresentation of stand your ground laws. All stand your ground laws do is allow you to defend yourself with lethal force. Most states that have them require that you have a legitimate reason to fear for your life before you resort to lethal force, and even then you can usually expect to spend some time in jail while the police sort out exactly what happened except in the most obvious cases. It's a far cry from a license to shoot whoever you feel like shooting.
If you want strict gun control then you're welcome to your opinion, but please leave the fear mongering at the door. We're getting way too much of that from the media right now as is.
Stand your ground laws are a defense attorney's wet dream. My client felt threatened so he went to his car to get his gun. Case dismissed. Want a study showing its nothing but the NRA pushing laws that benefit their main supporters the gun industry here you go. And for the record I am against gun control but I am also for getting rid of any laws written by that right wing corporate evil organization that is ALEC like stand your ground that exist only to kill or harm people for greater profits. Like I said countries where everyone must have guns to be safe generally are not considered developed countries.
http://econweb.tamu.edu/mhoekstra/castle_doctrine.pdf
It looks like the reality of torture is that it's OK as long as the target is guilty!
Of course, a trial is a minor detail. That seems to defy the US Constitution just a bit.
What should we have next? How about we vote for hanging using Twitter? Heck, we don't even need the trial. We can do that on Twitter, too.
I hope the President forces the military to arrest and try the officers who ordered this. Perhaps we can vote on them using Twitter too.
Due process is so quaint though. Why simply ignore the Constitution when you can go back even further and ignore the Magna Carta (you know the basis of western law) and make 11th century monarchs look democratic? We are at war with Eurasia(terrorists) we have always been at war with Eurasia.
Yep, only enemy soldiers... though the US Constitution bit about 'cruel and unusual punishment' went out of the window with the electric chair. If you must execute people, use a guillotine- far quicker and doesn't require a skilled axe-man.
It's a bit like the right to bear arms being dependant upon US not having a standing army... talk about cherry-picking.
As a document, it seems to be as creatively interpreted as the Bible.
In the word of Bill Hicks on the 'Christian' Right: ""I think what Jesus meant to say..." ... I never had that self confidence"
The rejected the guillotine because they felt bodily integrity was important. And after the revolution they were desperate to come up with a method of execution which wasn't hanging - hanging being associated with the evil british overlords they had just dumped.
Personally it's harder to think of a more cruel and unusual punishment than the electric chair. But with the gas chamber and lethal injection someone managed it.
The irony is we managed to get hanging to a fine art - possible to get a prisoner from bed to dead in just under 10 seconds.
It's a bit of just-so-stories that superficially make sense but are completely generated by digital-rectal manipulation, no? For instance, "after the revolution" so say 1776 they didn't want hanging so they chose the electric chair --- somewhere end of 19th century as electricity wasn't big yet...
So you're pretending there weren't executions for a good hundred year? No "String 'em high!" etc etc in Wild West settings etc?
In summary, no, the electric chair wasn't chosen to distinguish themselves from the English. I have no idea whether any of your other arguments have a stronger foundation or are similarly pulled out from a dark place. (And as for an earlier post by you, no mention of bears in the cables.)
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>In america they pledge allegiance to the flag daily at school,
That's probably a necessity: Most US 'hawks' base their thinking on the premise that the US is so divided - culturally, and more importantly, financially - that the only 'glue' that can stop the country ripping itself apart is the threat of a common enemy. This came out in the cold war, where CIA analysts decided that the USSRs military power was waning, so the neo-cons put together a think tank and decided that, for example, the inability of the CIA to detect Soviet submarines wasn't due to their absence, but rather that the sneaky ruskies had a developed a silent propulsion system a la Clancy's The Hunt for The Red October. There's video of Rumsfeld putting this forth this idea during the Reagan administration.
"Hey! How dare you tow a car with the American flag on it! Are you half-Taliban or something?!"
Donald Rumsfeld's Team B:
According to Anne Hessing Cahn (Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1977-1980), Team B's analysis of weapons systems was later proven to be false. "I would say that all of it was fantasy... if you go through most of Team B's specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong."[29] The CIA director at the time, George H. W. Bush, concluded that the Team B approach set "in motion a process that lends itself to manipulation for purposes other than estimative accuracy."[6][8] Brookings Institution Scholar Raymond Garthoff concurred, writing that in "retrospect, and with the Team B report and records now largely declassified, it is possible to see that virtually all of Team B's criticisms... proved to be wrong. On several important specific points it wrongly criticized and 'corrected' the official estimates, always in the direction of enlarging the impression of danger and threat."[30] A top CIA analyst called Team B "a kangaroo court of outside critics all picked from one point of view."[14]
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B for the sources.
You could complain about 100 days being even more arbitrary - and no doubt someone would have. Jail sentences and, by extension, time off them, are arbitrary by definition; why should you get 5 to 10 for Crime A instead of 6.2 to 9.66? It's not like certain crimes are cosmically linked to time constants.
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When this story first broke, there were people lining up around the block demanding that Manning be hung, tortured, and worse for his supposed treason. I think many people have a warped/misguided sense of patriotism, honor, and reverence for the military and its secrets. Probably due to our many TV shows that are thinly-veiled military propaganda.
It is genuinely very heartwarming to me to see that people posting to this comment thread are now overwhelmingly on the side of Manning and it seems to be well-understood how big of a sacrifice he made for his country (and the world) and the obvious good it has done.
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