“…hundreds of thousands of classified files…” In all of the stories about Bradley Manning, that’s the line that jumps out at me.
When I look at the comments section, it basically breaks down to hundreds of people writing the same two comments over and over again. Bradley Manning is a hero! Bradley Manning is a traitor!
Every time I point out that the basic morality of being a human being requires that we expose evil-doing, that Manning was actually exposing war crimes, that the heroes of history are the ones who defy authority, not the ones who serve it, somebody answers me back immediately with some twaddle about the Military Code of Justice.
It’s rather like how whenever I write a comment suggesting that maybe background checks to prove potential customers are not sociopathic Rambo wannabes before selling them high-powered, rapid fire weapons might be a reasonable idea, somebody responds immediately with their “2nd Amendment! 2nd Amendment!” rant, which includes the concept that everybody needs guns because we can’t trust our government, and I wonder if these are the same people.
I suspect they are.
Can they actually simultaneously hold the beliefs that the government should be able to keep all the secrets they want, and that we should be armed and prepared to overthrow the government? Can they simultaneously believe that the government can do no wrong, and that government is inherently evil?
To me, he’s a hero
I suspect that they can. Conservatives are nothing if not inconsistent.
But, back to my main point, about the “…hundreds of thousands of classified files…” Hundreds of thousands? Are we planning on invading somebody? If so, I want to know about it. Even so, a hundred thousand documents? If they run an average of 10 pages each, that’s over a million pages. Who took the time to read all those and decide they needed to be classified?
My guess is that 90 thousand or so of them were like “LOL” or “WTF,” (which is what inflated the numbers in the case of that general and the slut journalist and the Florida socialite) and they just got classified because of who they were from and some people’s e-mails are just off limits. Which they shouldn’t be, being public servants and all. Build your stupid smurf village on your own computer at home.
They should let Bradley Manning go free. In future, they should classify less stuff.
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