ACLU on Manning Sentence: "Something is seriously wrong with our justice system"

[ljm2002]

13. One thing we do know...

...is that many of those classified documents did not need to be classified and many should never have been classified. The video had been requested through a FOIA request by Reuters so they could find out what happened when their journalist was killed. The military claimed it had no information on the matter.

So for me, the argument about how large the leak was is irrelevant. What we should be asking is how many documents are classified purely for CYA reasons (which should be illegal if it isn't already). And we should be asking how many crimes were revealed in those documents. That video shows some crimes, indisputably: since even if you accept that the helicopter gunners mistook the reporter's telephoto lens for an RPG, they still shot and killed people who were already wounded and incapacitated, and they still shot and killed people attempting to help. Both of these are war crimes according to the Geneva Conventions, to which we are a signatory nation.

It would be naive in the extreme to think those documents don't show other crimes.

Let's have our legal system do a complete and thorough review of those documents and prosecute the guilty parties, then we'll talk about how much time Bradley Manning should do for bringing these matters to light.