For me it's clear that the videos show a breech of International Law and possibly a war crime. Does the United States abide by International Law? Of course not. It doesn't even abide by the Geneva Convention. Nor even by its own constitution. When people look and see a 'republic' or a 'democracy'... this is illusion. It's spin. It's a fairy tale.

And as the ongoing Hedges v. Obama is showing, in all likely hood the US government is already torturing disappeared US citizens in black sites somewhere unknown.

As soon as anyone tries to shine light on these crimes (and they are crimes) they invoke powers that allow them to bury them and bring the full force of their system down on them to send a message to others. None of this is going to work. The more they try and surpress it, the more it will flare up. Bradley Manning is just one of the visible victims. There are and will be many more victims. Not least the many millions of innocents killed in foreign lands.

The western nations are an empire in decline. The middle class is decimated. The economy is toast. The numbers are all fabricated. It's all down hill from here. And as the BRICS rise, do you think they are going to forgive us our trespasses? Of course not. They are going to hold us down and fuck us for a long, long time. And frankly, we all deserve it.

I'm doing what I can, no need to worry. And I refused to go into the army on penalty of (significant) jailtime, got off very lucky but I would have happily gone to jail to avoid becoming someone else's tool.

No cloak of super morality here, just one guy deciding for himself.

I think the argument can be made that Manning truly believed in the goal of the US war effort, and could not stand to see the US doing things that he viewed as hypocritical. To someone in his position, living every day fighting a war that most of us are clueless about, the idea that the organization he was a part of had some bad apples, or worse that it had structural rot and corruption, would have been dispiriting and infuriating, and something that he was willing to take personal risk to fix.

So I think that to consider Manning's thoughts and actions unusual you have to make the argument that the military is full of cynics who just roll their eyes when atrocities happen or buffoons who drink the patriotism kool-ade and view the US as being capable of no wrong...

Manning had unique intellect, unique skills, and unique access to data. He was also in the small minority of people familiar with Wikileaks and ballsy enough to risk his own life by leaking information. There are probably many people in the military and in various corporate jobs who view Manning as a hero but who lack the personal courage to do what he did.

What would you assume would happen if a whistleblower stepped forward and revealed lies and corruption... I might have predicted initial outrage followed by reforms and the eventual pardon of the whistleblower. Manning's case shows us that the actual result is years in prison without charge, a massive attempted cover-up, and all kinds of shady behavior by the US Government. There has still to date been no reform undertaken other than to prevent information leaks through the methods Manning used.

Oddly the US news media has not called for reforms even as a counter-balance to its coverage of Manning (and its coverage of Assange's so-called rape charges). It would seem to require virtually no courage on the part of journalists to address the question of reforms even as a subtext to the sensationalism and propaganda.