Officers of the United States Government should be on trial -- not PFC Bradley Manning.

[JDPriestly]

153. I did not read all the Wikileaks, but I feel better off that he released them.

We have the First Amendment to protect our right to free speech. But just how meaningful is that if we don't have the information to inform our "free speech"? I just don't understand how you can have free speech without the maximum possible free information.

While some of the Wikileaks documents might have been better kept secret, while for some of them the government's classification was justified, most of them should not have been classified in the first place.

In fact, no one would have been interested in the drivel from the embassies to HQ or whatever they were had they been available to everyone in the first place.

And, as for those few documents that the government can accurately claim should have been kept secret, one has to ask why in the world they were disseminated to so many people including Manning who had no need to see them.

In WWII, our government was very good at keeping secrets. The first rule, if you read the books on this, was to keep the scope of people having access to secrets as narrow as possible.

If there was any serious security breach, I blame the government for it, not Manning. Why in the world did they disseminate anything all that important to so many people. I don't think Manning was all that high-level.

The fault is not with Manning but with his superiors. That is my view. They should be the ones facing court-martial. Not Manning. They should be thanking Manning for pointing out the weaknesses in their system.

And they should be narrowing the categories of items that they classify.