General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Like it or Not, Bradley Manning is a Traitor [View all]cascadiance
(19,537 posts)... and has proven to subsequent whistleblowers that "going through channels" DOES NOT WORK when the system is as broken as ours is now! As a person with a law degree, she probably knew how far she could bend the rules and not wind up in prison, but most of what she knows still hasn't been made available to the public or has been covered up both by our government and compliant corporatist owned and compliant "mainstream media". A lot of who she's pointed fingers at haven't been investigated as well.
Heck she had the current head of the FISA Court, Reggie Walton "randomly assigned" TWICE to two of her different court cases where she attempted to go to court to be heard on the stand and tell what she knew. In both cases Walton (who also hovered of the joke of a prosecution of Scooter Libby in the Valerie Plame incident), used "State Secrets Privilege" which is the common methodology if they can't turn away a case for "standing" reasons to facilitate the coverups that have been going on for years.
If Maning had tried to go through channels instead of WikiLeaks, do you think any of us would have known about the crap that he exposed like the Reuter's journalists being carelessly killed by our troops? NO!
And I'll bet there are countless other whistleblowers that tried to "go through channels" that perhaps even Manning heard about earlier that we haven't even heard about because they're situations have been covered up too!
All sending Manning to prison does is send a message to other would-be whistleblowers in the future, like Snowden, that there only shot at getting their story out and not winding up being tortured and buried in prison is to leave the country and have a lot of bargaining chips. I don't think that Snowden will be the last person that plays this game. And our security could be made better if we actually had a responsible government in place that did provide for some outside entities set up by groups like the ACLU, Amnesty International, EPIC, EFF, etc. to have some form of oversight power in the government that is managed so that those that do have information that the public needs to have, they have a more organized and trustworthy methodology of providing that oversight. What we have now is the Wild, Wild West. And it IS our government and the corrupt individuals that have lead it over the last decade or so's fault in allowing it to get in that state.