If Bradley Manning is guilty, he doesn't deserve sympathy.

[cascadiance]

211. Whistleblowers, especially security whistleblowers have the current system working against them...

... Just like the current system legitimizes and makes the system of bribery that the banksters are involved in completely "legal" and doesn't allow for it to prosecute many of them for crimes of corruption that they clearly would have been nailed with with laws that were in place in the past and corruptly altered for the present.

There is similar problems with our security state, when the system puts in so many loopholes to protect those abusing our rights as citizens, and many others around the world that our victims to our military adventurism, etc. "State Secrets Privilege", etc. are excuses to keep "appropriate channels" from working for whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Bradley Manning, Sibel Edmonds, and many others out there that try to bring to light to the public what they perceive is wrong going on behind closed doors.

In the case of Ellsberg, he lived in a different time, where even though he might have been put away, there was enough of a power structure that had teeth that perceived the merit of his efforts to correct the system, to find ways to allow him to help correct it and not be punished for doing so. Manning would like to think that there are those in our present system that would see his actions in the same capacity of what the past systems had seen Ellsberg's actions as being, and work with him to get things fixed.

In the case of Sibel Edmonds, she's tried to do the "appropriate channels" approach, and has been shut down on so many levels to the point that she's been pushed aside (with "State Secrets" privilege shutting down court proceedings, etc.), and many of what she's tried to bring to light has been ignored and not dealt with. Manning doesn't want to fall in to that trap either, from where I see it.

Today, we criminalize people like Manning, when they push the limits beyond what the current system allows for, which would appear the only way that insiders can proceed if they really want to bring on change. They have to be able to make the personal sacrifice that Manning has gone through.

Now we still need to hear the details of what Manning has done, to help us judge how many of his actions were really motivated by an interest for working for all of our interests, or if they were selfish and destructive to others at some point. I've not seen the latter yet, and from what I've seen so far, I believe him to be a man of principle. He now gets a chance at a trial to help validate those feelings for many of us. I only hope that the system will allow him room to help affect system change the way that Ellsberg was allowed to do many years ago. If it doesn't, it portends a future where perhaps there will be a lot more pain and personal destruction on both the sides of the top and bottom of our society as people get fed up with the current corrupt system and want to change it and seek other ways of doing so than the more constructive ways that Manning perhaps has tried to be engaged with. That's an ugly future that many might not like, and our leaders need to see that possibility before they judge and punish Manning too harshly if indeed he was more of a Danield Ellsberg than a Benedict Arnold.