Bradley Manning is a true American hero.

[struggle4progress]

73. Nothing obliges you to like Mr Obama or his administration, but comparing them all to Nazis

falls well outside the realm of sane and sober political conversation

The first group of White Rose members were tried four days after their arrest, in a court where they were not permitted to mount any defense, before a judge who (it is known from films) had a habit of shouting at defendants so loudly and constantly that defendants could not be heard, and they were executed on the day of their trial, for their pamphleteering

Bradley Manning was not executed four days after his arrest, and (in fact) he does not face the death penalty: he will receive a trial, after which he will be allowed appeals. To judge from his offering guilty pleas this last week, the likely upshot will be that he will convicted and will serve a lengthy sentence

There will never be mass support for Mr Manning, because no one (including Mr Manning) has ever offered any coherent explanation of his actions, and there seems to be no prospect of a coherent explanation forthcoming. In his statement this last week, Mr Manning indicated that he released hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables in order to stir public debate, and his statement also made it entirely clear that Mr Manning could not have been aware of the actual content of the vast amounts of diplomatic material he dumped

You are, of course, entirely free to hold that view that diplomats ought never converse secretly with their home governments, and you are entirely free to persuade the international community to adopt whatever openness standards seem appropriate to you -- but that would be a long uphill fight, because every single government in the world uses accepted privileges (such as the diplomatic pouch) in order to converse in secret with their diplomats. As an alternative, you could try persuading your Congressman that the US should never converse in secret with its diplomats, and you could ask your Congressman to demand the US publish all its diplomatic correspondence in realtime, as the correspondence occurs: however, I expect most Congressman would thereafter regard you as nuts