What we are witnessing in the legal moves against Bradley Manning is what happens when the Rule of Law is replaced by the Rule of Man. In this case, and as has been the case since the turn of the century, the Man is the President of the United States.
The saddest sentence in the article is the last one: Apparently if Bradley Manning had committed war crimes, instead of exposing them, he would be a free man, instead of facing life in prison for his heroic deeds.
America was delusional to think it could dispense with the hard-won Geneva Conventions and escape with its soul intact. Now it too operates a reign of terror where extra-judicial killings are an accepted part of national policy. This will not be easy to reverse. I worry that the USA might never get back to what it once was.
Many years ago, when Charles Manson was adding new definitions to urban terror, I read an interview given by one of his associates. In the interview, the associate, and I can't recall his name but I seem to recall that he was a Viet Nam vet, said that he had warned Charles against starting to kill. He had told him that murdering was like smoking in that once you start, it's hard to stop.
The US Special Forces all the way up to their Commander-in-Chief would benefit from reflecting on that. And to say the 'others' do it is no more an excuse for men in power than it is for schoolchildren in the play-ground.

Yes, there is and remains a legal duty to expose war crimes!
But that is where it ends.
There is no requirement to expose official secrets. Or release entirely unvalidated information that puts thousands of real lives at real risk!
Or indeed, the sacred oath one takes, when entrusted with the same!
If anyone can say with any surety whatsoever, that the release of confidential information often supplied by other more moral whistle blowers, has not resulted in imprisonment or murder of any or some of those sources, then perhaps Bradley could be given a good hard slap on the wrist with a wet tram ticket, and a dishonourable discharge!
However, given a number of those resources may not now be reporting, one can suspect the worst has occurred?
There is also another legal requirement never ever mentioned by Bradley's misguided support group; namely, do the crime and do the time!
Rhrosty.

This trial is about all those things raised by the author. Manning has to set the example to discourage other leaking of documents or whistleblowers.

I imagine the US public service and defence services have similar Codes of Conduct as Australia, which obligate employees to report fraud, unethical behaviour, mismanagement and breaches of the Code to a higher authority. The reality is very different to what is written on paper. The written word on paper is to give a veneer of accountability.

In truth whistleblowers, leakers or those who report on them often experience the harshest, life-changing and rigorous pursuits because they have broken what is essentially the Gang code. And it is like a gang. You speak out then you become the betrayer, not the other way around regardless of the severity and importance of the information being revealed.

It is Bradley Manning's legal duty to expose war crimes, it is not his duty to post out hundreds of thousands of documents including diplomatic correspondence.

An editorial in to-days Australian is clear and unambiguous. Private Manning is on trial for treachery.
By his own admission he has pleaded guilty to 10 out of 22 charges. Manning’s treachery has undoubtedly endangered lives and harmed the interests of his employer the United States. As a serving solder his loyalty should be to the country he pledged to defend.
Private Manning is deserving of the penalties proscribed by law.
It is of course lawful, but at the same time misguided, for clever lawyers to make excuse for treachery, especially when the treacherous behaviour is in accord with a left wing agenda.

Oh come on girl, a lawyer preaching about truth & honesty.

Pull the other one lady, it yodels.

@anti-green
"It is of course lawful, but at the same time misguided, for clever lawyers to make excuse for treachery, especially when the treacherous behaviour is in accord with a left wing agenda."
Is treacherous behaviour somehow more acceptable if it's in accord with a right wing agenda? I am thinking here of torture, rendition, targeted killings, night-raids and drone missiles killing fifty to get one.

Halduell

You are correct in suggesting that neither a left wing agenda nor your so called right wing fantasies are relevant to the trial of Private Manning. His treachery as a serving soldier is directly to his country and indirectly to the allies and friends of the USA

It's ironic that most commenters are discussing ways that Manning should be punished for revealing the brutality and duplicity and imperial plotting of the U.S. and its immoral Allies.

Pouring molten lead into his ears or putting him on the rack or cutting his stomach and allowing his innards to flow onto a fire should be considered. These punishments were common during the Dark Ages so they are especially relevant to our current age!

The release of the video by Wikileaks showing the Apache gunship crew laughing as they mowed down unarmed Iraqi civilians was a golden moment in the barbarity of the U.S. and its armed forces.

Know thy enemy, ye fools!

@anti-green
Are you suggesting that torture, rendition, targeted killings, night-raids and drone missiles killing fifty to get one are nothing more than right wing fantasies? These acts have all been admitted by those committing them. Jeremy Scahill's book, Dirty Wars, is well documented, if you would like to take a look. Other places, too.
As to the issue of a serving soldier betraying his country by speaking out, soldiers of the Third Reich were adjudged guilty in the Nuremberg Trials for 'only' following orders. Such a defence/excuse was adjudged inadequate then, and it still is. Or it should be. A war crime is a war crime, although we all know it is only the losers, and never the winners, who are made to answer for them.

David G I agree. Obama is the one who should be facing charges of war crimes and trashing the US Constitution. In fact Congressman Walter Jones has initiated impeachment proceedings against Obama, however Congress is now too corrupted to vote on anything pertaining to integrity or matters of conscience.Even Ralph Nader just recently said words to this effect.

Halduell
The history of Western Civilisation has never been with-out blemish. However,the values of the enlightenment, of Voltaire, empirical schools of philosophy , the elevation of the individual over collective rights are to be cherished. Islam and Islamic terror is a current threat to the western way of life. There is indeed a clash of culture and civilisation between Western value and Islamic values; between English common law and Shia law.
You may well believe that Islamic Terrorists fight according to some sort of Queensbury Rules and/or inthe spirit of human rights. In this belief, I fear you are sadly deluded.

WHAT HAVE THE AMERICANS EVER DONE FOR US!

Marjorie Cohn: They've bled us white, the bastards. They've taken everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers' fathers.

Haldual: And from our fathers' fathers' fathers.

Marilyn Sheppard: Yeah.

Jeremy: And from our fathers' fathers' fathers' fathers.

Marilyn Sheppard: Yeah. All right, Jeremy. Don't labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return?!

Dreamon: The aqueduct?

Marily Sheppard: What?

Dreamon: The aqueduct.

Marilyn Sheppard: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah.

Emperor Julianne: And the sanitation.

Dreamon: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Marilyn. Remember what the city used to be like? God! This place used to stink before the Yanks came here.

Marilyn Sheppard: Yeah. All right. I'll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Yanks have done.

Arjay: And the roads.

Marily Sheppard: Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don't they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads--

Jay of Melbourne: Irrigation.

Mitch@T4R: Medicine.

Marilyn Sheppard: Huh? Heh? Huh...?

Killarney: Education.

Marilyn Sheppard: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.

Praxidice: And the wine.

Suseonline: Oh, yes. The wine. Yeah...

Jay of Melbourne: Yeah. Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Marilyn, if the Yanks left. Huh?

DavidG: Public baths.

Suseonline: And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now, Marilyn.

Yuyutsu: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it. They're the only ones who could in a place like this.

Marilyn Sheppard: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, public safety, public baths, and public health, WHAT HAVE THE YANKS EVER DONE FOR US!?

Praxidice: Peace?

Marilyn Sheppard: Oh. Peace? Shut up!

LEGO misses the point. "What have the Americans ever done for us?" Straight out of the Life of Brian with Roman bent.

The West over the last 300 yrs has been enslaved by a debt money creation system. The USA was the last to fall in 1913 when President Woodrow Wilson signed away the right to create from nothing, the money to equal the people's productivity. The US Federal Reserve is a private cartel of banks who supply all the money for the US Govt to function. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

The people of the West have created and survived even under this oppressive system with the lie of democracy but now the debt created out of nothing of $40 trillion is more than half the GDP of the planet. It can never be repaid and a few elites now own both us and our Govts.

So LEGO, our Roman Western Elites are not the source of our success but just mere parasites who are taking us all to destruction.

Rome was very successful with cheap bronze money that was carefully controlled by a responsible Govt. Caesar produced a gold coin with his face on it and destroyed Rome because a few elites now had most of the gold and the medium of exchange could not function to facilitate real production.

Today the medium of exchange is owned by private central banks and they are using it for their own purpose while production again falters.

Shall it elucidate further?

@anti-green
I can assure you I do not believe Islamic terrorists fight in the spirit of human rights. Clearly they don't. The question is, do we? And if we don't, how are we then any better?
Bradley Manning held a very unflattering mirror up to our eyes, and he will pay dearly for that. But he did no wrong. Quite the contrary.

If some fool is going to have a pretend debate with me at least spell my name correctly.

Bradley Manning is not a criminal. He exposed criminals and we are constantly being told that dobbing in murderers is a good thing aren't we?

The cowards who slaughtered 24 people at Haditha in revenge for the death of one soldier earlier in the day got a slap on the wrist.

Marjorie Cohn's implication, that Bradley Manning is some sort of Internationalist saint who martyred himself by releasing 250,000 classified documents, is a premise more worthy of hilarity than serious consideration.

That a few of those documents contained references and images pertaining to alleged war crimes does not mitigate against the scale of his treachery. If Bradley Manning had any evidence of alleged war crimes, he had a duty to reveal his evidence to his superior officers. Both he and Marjorie Cohn are fully aware that he had no authorisation to post them all over the internet.

The Americans have declared that Bradley Manning's actions have resulted in the deaths of people working for the Americans, and the wrecking of several intelligence operations.

Bradley Manning came from a broken home involving two people who were citizens of different countries. He was unable to form a sense of allegiance to either country, and his attitude was probably reinforced by the left wing academic teachers, who never tire of putting the boot into their own societies. He was bullied as a kid in both countries, probably because of his small stature and effeminacy. That he seethed with resentment, is evident from his episodic bouts of uncontrollable violent behaviour, and the fact that he was unable to keep a steady job.

After joining the US Army, he found the perfect way to get back at the society he resented. That this is all about self esteem, is plainly revealed through the fact that after he committed his crime, he felt the need to brag about it on a hacking site. Fortunately, one hacker who had been brought up right, went to the FBI and dobbed him in.

I feel sorry for Bradley Manning because of his circumstances. But I do not forgive him for what he did. Neither do I forgive the Marjorie Cohn's and the Marilyn Sheppard's of this world, who's constant unwarranted attacks upon the civilisation they choose to live under, obviously has an effect upon dysfunctional, vulnerable, and easily led people like Bradley Manning

Lego, that you would call the chaos we live in a civilization shows how much out of touch with reality you are.

Worship the U.S. if you must but don't waste your time extolling its virtues: it has none!

The USA is the leader of the "Anglosphere", David G. If our civilisation is so bad, why is everyone from failed civilisations breaking their necks and drowning themselves to get into our nations?

The rule of thumb for every person wishing to live in a prosperous and tolerant society, with personnel freedoms that are unprecedented in the history of the world is, "head for anywhere they speak English."

The civilisations created by the North European protestant people have created the modern world and set the standards for those Asian societies now overtaking us in prosperity. Those that copied the European civilisations are doing very well. Those that remain mired in Theological immaturity, or who did not have the cognitive intelligence to attain modernity, are going backwards into the future.

That you can see nothing but negativity in your own civilisation really does amaze me. I think your attitude is a measure of youthful immaturity. In the same way that an adolescent grasps a cigarette, because he thinks it will show how adult he or she is, you grasp the bizarre social views of a fashionable elite who's attitudes you accept without question, because they a represent a caste you aspire to join.

But I was the same when I was younger, so I can't denigrate you too much. Most people grow out of their left wing views, and I have every confidence that sooner or later, your capacity for reasoned thought will over ride your present compulsive need to conform. At that stage, you will switch on your now dormant reasoned analysis circuits.

The only older people who continue with your attitudes after a certain age, are those who live within the confines of the cloistered halls of the Artz academia where unrealistic attitudes become inbred. Or within the confines of the public service, where the benefits of state inefficiency are held in high regard from those with totally secure jobs.