Bradley Manning charged in WikiLeaks case

[JDPriestly]

33. I am not in the group that thinks that Manning

revealed the Dead Sea Scrolls.

As for this:

A slightly more abstract example: during World War II, the Germans announced to the world that they'd discovered the remains of thousands of Polish military officers executed by the Soviet Union in 1940 when the Soviets controlled half of Poland, and therefore according to them this proved both the barbarism of the communists and that the Allies were subservient to the vicious Slavs, and that all decent Poles should support Germany in the war. The Soviets retorted that it was obviously another German war crime--not a hard sell given the use of "Action Groups" led by the SS on the eastern front to execute entire villages.

That was all information available to the public, no big deal if cables were published about it, right? Little problem: Although many people treated the German claims as propaganda (for which it was certainly used), the US and UK both knew that the Germans were being 100% completely accurate about the discovery of dead Polish officers and who killed them, because the UK had intercepted and broken the encrypted signals from the German motorized signals regiment which found the first mass grave.

Concealing the truth equals lying, at least in California concealment of a material facts constitutes fraud in certain circumstances.

The US government did not tell the American people the truth about Soviet brutality in Poland. I think that hiding that truth amounted to a huge lie. How can we claim to have a government "of the people," when that government lies to the people or conceals important facts from the people. Government "by the people" and "of the people" can only exist when the people are fully informed of the facts.

What we have is a fraud, a government that rules by lies, that gains what appears to be majority support by withholding material information from the electorate.

This was particularly true of the Bush administration in the build-up to the Iraq War. Now, the Bush administration may have had legitimate reasons for wanting to invade Iraq, but if they did not know that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, it is only because they did not want to know it. The United Nations inspection team reported that there were no such weapons, and judging from the movements of our troops as they entered Iraq after the bombings, our government knew full well that Iraq had no such weapons.

A government that truly represents the people and is of the people does not lie to the people -- not even by omission.

Let's face it. Ours is a government of the oligarchy, by the oligarchy and for the oligarchy. And the oligarchy lies to us. Most of the ridiculous information that passed as "secrets" in the files Manning should not have been classified as secret. In fact, no one would have paid much attention to most of it had it not been labelled "secret." The whole business is very strange to my mind.