Friday, August 23, 2013

Rand Paul Backs Away, Again, From His Father on Chelsea (Bradley) Manning

Judging from the comments about my earlier post about Rand Paul and his view on Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, he has doubled down on his view.

Politico reports:
While Paul has spoken out against expansive government surveillance programs — and the hypothetical domestic use of drones — he declined to join his father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, in praising military leaker Bradley Manning, who was sentenced this week to 35 years in prison for handing over secret documents to the website WikiLeaks. Manning this week took the name “Chelsea,” announcing plans to become a woman.

Ron Paul said the country needs “more Bradley Mannings” to blow the whistle on abuses of government power; Rand Paul said he disagrees, though he said he doesn’t “know enough about military law or what the sentencing is to know what’s fair and what’s not.”
“I think we need to have laws against leaking national secrets,” he said. “It has to be punished."
Ron, on the other hand, has also said that Manning should be released from prison.

8 comments:

  1. I read the comments in the other post on Manning. I don't get the sympathy for him at all. He didn't leak documents to provide a great service. He is an angry malcontent that aimlessly leaked information that potentially could have put people in harm's way.

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    1. No, he embarrassed the USG. He leaked videos and information that should be of concerned to the American tax payers and people with a soul. It may have put people in danger, but the information is old by now. Plus, the only danger that people are in is having the USG blowing things up and killing people.

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    2. When Manning got to Iraq, he found himself working under orders “to round up and hand over Iraqi civilians to America’s new Iraqi allies, who he could see were then torturing them with electrical drills and other implements.” The people he arrested, and handed over for torture, were guilty of such “crimes” as writing “scholarly critiques” of the U.S. occupation forces and its puppet government. When he expressed his moral reservations to his supervisor, Manning “was told to shut up and get back to herding up Iraqis.”

      The people Manning saw tortured, by the way, were frequently the very same people who had been tortured by Saddam: trade unionists, members of the Iraqi Freedom Congress, and other freedom-loving people who had no more use for Halliburton and Blackwater than they had for the Baath Party.

      He didn't release anything top secret like undercover agents or informants which would have been top secret but old 'secret' and 'confidential' stuff. stuff if you looked you could find on page 15 of newspapers and the Knight ridder agency and on the web but Manning provided a lot more detail.

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  2. The acorn didn't fall far from the tree. It's just that the tree was on a steep hill, and the acorn rolled away.

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  3. You can stop putting a name Chelsea Manning doesn't use and is clearly not legitimate in brackets like it's in anyway relevant now.

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