Bradley Manning Makes Statement 440
Bradley Manning, the 25-year-old U.S. Army soldier who allegedly leaked hundreds of thousands of internal memos about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, has been held by the government for two and a half years. On Thursday he pleaded guilty 10 of 22 charges brought against him, and now he has released an official statement. Here's an excerpt:
"On 3 February 2010, I visited the WLO website on my computer and clicked on the submit documents link. Next I found the submit your information online link and elected to submit the SigActs via the onion router or TOR anonymizing network by special link. ... I attached a text file I drafted while preparing to provide the documents to the Washington Post. It provided rough guidelines saying ‘It’s already been sanitized of any source identifying information. You might need to sit on this information– perhaps 90 to 100 days to figure out how best to release such a large amount of data and to protect its source. This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of twenty-first century asymmetric warfare. Have a good day. After sending this, I left the SD card in a camera case at my aunt’s house in the event I needed it again in the future. I returned from mid-tour leave on 11 February 2010. Although the information had not yet been publicly by the WLO, I felt this sense of relief by them having it. I felt I had accomplished something that allowed me to have a clear conscience based upon what I had seen and read about and knew were happening in both Iraq and Afghanistan everyday."
Re:Arab Spring (Score:4, Informative)
I don't disagree about how our terribly our government works, but it's kind of funny that you conveniently left out the very next question in that interview:
QUESTION: Is this file, by any chance, connected to the invitation – extended invitation – for President Mubarak to visit the United States?
SECRETARY CLINTON: No. It’s an annual report. It is not in any way connected. We look forward to President Mubarak coming as soon as his schedule would permit. I had a wonderful time with him this morning. I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.
QUESTION: How do you view the presidency in Egypt, the future of the presidency in Egypt?
SECRETARY CLINTON: That’s for the people of Egypt to decide. That is a very important issue that really is up to Egyptians.
Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead (Partyvan edition!) (Score:2, Informative)
Memorable quotes for
Looker (1981)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082677/quotes [imdb.com]
"John Reston: Television can control public opinion more effectively than armies of secret police, because television is entirely voluntary. The American government forces our children to attend school, but nobody forces them to watch T.V. Americans of all ages *submit* to television. Television is the American ideal. Persuasion without coercion. Nobody makes us watch. Who could have predicted that a *free* people would voluntarily spend one fifth of their lives sitting in front of a *box* with pictures? Fifteen years sitting in prison is punishment. But 15 years sitting in front of a television set is entertainment. And the average American now spends more than one and a half years of his life just watching television commercials. Fifty minutes, every day of his life, watching commercials. Now, that's power."
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"The United States has it's own propaganda, but it's very effective because people don't realize that it's propaganda. And it's subtle, but it's actually a much stronger propaganda machine than the Nazis had but it's funded in a different way. With the Nazis it was funded by the government, but in the United States, it's funded by corporations and corporations they only want things to happen that will make people want to buy stuff. So whatever that is, then that is considered okay and good, but that doesn't necessarily mean it really serves people's thinking - it can stupify and make not very good things happen."
- Crispin Glover: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000417/bio [imdb.com]
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"It's only logical to assume that conspiracies are everywhere, because that's what people do. They conspire. If you can't get the message, get the man." - Mel Gibson (from an interview)
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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William Casey, CIA Director
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"The real reason for the official secrecy, in most instances, is not to keep the opposition (the CIA's euphemistic term for the enemy) from knowing what is going on; the enemy usually does know. The basic reason for governmental secrecy is to keep you, the American public, from knowing - for you, too, are considered the opposition, or enemy - so that you cannot interfere. When the public does not know what the government or the CIA is doing, it cannot voice its approval or disapproval of their actions. In fact, they can even lie to your about what they are doing or have done, and you will not know it. As for the second advantage, despite frequent suggestion that the CIA is a rogue elephant, the truth is that the agency functions at the direction of and in response to the office of the president. All of its major clandestine operations are carried out with the direct approval of or on direct orders from the White House. The CIA is a secret tool of the president - every president. And every president since Truman has lied to the American people in order to protect the agency. When lies have failed, it has been the duty of the CIA to take the blame for the president, thus protecting him. This is known in the business as "plausible denial." The CIA, functioning as a secret instrument of the U.S. government and the presidency, has long misused and abused history and continues to do so."
- Victor Marchetti, Propaganda and Disinformation: How the CIA Manufactures History
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George Carlin:
"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehous
Re:Torturing ants (Score:5, Informative)
I am sorry that you still believe that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were "wars against terrorism". Missions into these countries were already planned before September 11, 2011.
Do read up on the organisation Project for the New American Century [wikipedia.org].
Read what the PNAC had been lobbying the Clinton administration to do, long before September 11, 2001, and do look at which high-ranking members of PNAC that had got high positions in the Bush administration in 2001.
This is not a theory of mine about a supposed secret conspiracy. It has been out in the open all the time. For years, PNAC had a public web site where all this information was available.
Torture is not only not civilized, it is also not reliable. The victim tends to not answer what the torturer wants to hear, not he truth.
Back in 2003, there was no indication whatsoever that Al-Qaeda had any connection with Saddam Hussein. The only testimony that there was a link had been obtained during torture - a testimony that was later proven to be false. After the invasion, no proof of any link had been found.
Re:Its hard to tell (Score:4, Informative)
He wasn't in the best frame of mind because he was having serious psychological issues related to gender identity disorder, sexuality in a "don't ask, don't tell" military, and a handful of other issues. He was looking at a possible discharge from service.
Lay off the rhetoric, it's making you jumpy.
Re:Its hard to tell (Score:2, Informative)
That's about as narrow a world view as I'd expect from i_have_mental_health_issues email address.
Unfortunately, that's pretty representative of about half of the population at large (based on my own observations).
Please leave the war and the killing to the big boys and go back to watching "reality TV", please.
CmdrTaco (Score:5, Informative)
Then one of the said newspapers hired CmdrTaco. Taco was able to explode the zip file with gzip but then he refused to let others read the documents inside because the documents were not in an open format.
Re:Arab Spring (Score:4, Informative)
Compared to most of the world, they are definitely about average in the spectrum from say Norway which probably has the best democracy to North Korea which is probably the furthest from democracy.
That is definitely better than the average for the middle east which is the worst region in the world overall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index [wikipedia.org]