It's too bad that Bradley Manning didn't torture and kill people instead of telling us about it

[MADem]

58. BGen Karpinski was demoted to Colonel, IIRC.

She was relieved of command of those prisons. She didn't go to jail. She retired with an honorable discharge, despite admitting she "broke the Geneva Conventions." She collects a hefty pension--between her retirement and her husband's active duty pay, she's a one percenter. She wrote a book and made some money from that. She disobeyed a lawful order and was busted for shoplifting, that's why she was demoted.

Here's the bottom line about that whole mess--you're in charge, you take the hit. She didn't memorialize her concerns in a way that left no ambiguity, and she had issues of her own that impacted her conduct in her most senior rank, which also didn't make her a good 'witness to the truth.' It's unfortunate, but that's life. Anyone who plays that game needs to be like Caesar's wife. It's also bad news when the military put a hands-off hotelier in charge of prisons. There should have been better oversight of the entire process by those in charge, but, as we know, there wasn't. Again, unfortunate, but you're not unringing that bell or deflecting from Manning's own problems by complaining about it.

I will subscribe to the "Two wrongs don't make a right" school. Manning had options--one was to take a discharge and complain in public as a member of the antiwar movement. Instead, he violated his oath, stole bulk amounts of classified material, including gossipy State cables that had absolutely NOTHING to do with his reservations, gave it to Assange for publication, committed assault upon the person of his supervisor, and in general acted like a dumbass.

I know a guy whose career ended because he gundecked a classified material control report that didn't involve anything higher than "CONFIDENTIAL." The military doesn't play when it comes to this kind of thing--anyone who wants to whistleblow has to either do it responsibly (and giving reams of shit to "Wikileaks" without reading it isn't the way to do that) or take the hit when they get caught.