Chelsea Manning confirms health status with attorneys | Hacker News Reader

Chelsea Manning confirms health status with attorneys

chelseamanning.org

92 pointsluizlopes45 comments

This really puts the whole Hillary Clinton email scandal into perspective, huh?

The message seems to be that if you leak classified data to the American people you get a big punishment, whereas if you leak classified data carelessly (Clinton) or for your girlfriend's book (Petraeus) the most you can expect is a slap on the wrist. That's f ed up.

To be fair, it's pretty standard for crimes to have differing punishments depending on whether they were accidental or purposeful. Sometimes they're even considered different crimes entirely (i.e., murder vs manslaughter).

(I'm not defending Chelsea's treatment here. I just think it's odd that grizzles has singled out this particular aspect of the situation as worthy of outrage.)

Petraeus did it for sex. He got a fine, and no prison time.

He also leaked far less data and had an idea of what he was leaking. Manning did far, far more damage to national security interests the law was designed to protect.

He was also in the military, which carries different expectations of behaviour, and a tougher system of account.

The system of account should be stricter the higher you go up, no?

Otherwise you seem to be making the case for civilian leaders to not have access at all to sensitive information.

(Sidebar: Because of the way this played out, this is probably going to be an impossible topic to talk about for many years. And the system is going to suffer for it.)

>The system of account should be stricter the higher you go up, no?

There's more than one dimension here. The "system of account", as you call it, should be stricter the higher up you go, and it should also be stricter if you're uniformed military.

Yeah but Hillary and the Petraeus are civilians no? Or at the very least not subject to military jurisdiction and standards.

It also ended his career...

It is f ed up, but that's not the message.

The message is that if you're a powerful person in DC, and if your leaks are not intended to embarrass or shame the big power structures of DC, you can expect a slap on the wrist.

That's exactly what I said, yo. Just formulated a different way. So much for the 14th amendment.

No one want's the lion to kill the gazelle. But they do. Get over it Mr. Jefferson - as someone said before the declaration was drafted.

I'm not a fan of her, but no one has showed Clinton leaked it, to my knowledge. She emailed it insecurely, but to people with appropriate clearance.

2 important clarifications: 1) Clinton did not "leak" anything, 2) Her emails did not contain anything that was classified at the time it was sent.

I'm not defending her decisions to use private email servers, but using the phrase "leak classified data" when speaking of her is not accurate.

You're right about the "leak" distinction, but the "classified at the time it was sent" question is stickier:

http://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/clintons-handling-of-classi...

> More than 2,000 of the 30,490 emails Clinton turned over to the State Department contained classified information, including 110 emails in 52 email chains that contained classified information at the time they were sent or received. (Most emails were retroactively deemed to contain classified information by the U.S. agencies from which the information originated.)

> Some of the emails containing classified information “bore markings indicating the presence of classified information,” contrary to Clinton’s claims that none was marked classified. Comey did not provide a specific number.

> "Only a very small number of the emails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information," Comey said. "But even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an email, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it."

It's also entirely possible that of the thousands of emails that were not turned over, some of them contained classified information. We know there were a non-zero number of these:

> Among those several thousand work-related emails that were not provided to the State Department, Comey said, "three of those were classified at the time they were sent or received; one at the secret level and two at the confidential level. There were no additional top secret emails found."

Comey also admitted under questioning that the emails with "classified markings" were not marked classified as specified in the manual (with headers etc), and given that, it would be a reasonable for someone to not consider them marked classified.

That's not what it says at all. Manning dumped all kinds of unredacted, classified information on an organization that's an enemy of the United States. These actions say a random, Army private doing something that foolish and damaging will get punished severely. It's obvious that his intentional leaks of all the war files and State cables were far more severe than someone just getting email working despite policy.

When you write a letter to someone facing 20+ years more in prison, who has just tried to kill herself, what do you say? I'm kind of at a loss for words -- "hope you get well soon?" "hope you are out of the hospital and back to your, uh, home soon?"

https://www.chelseamanning.org/learn-more/write-to-chelsea-m...

The best-case scenario for the people keeping her in prison is that we forget about her, and she spends years there, forgotten by the rest of the world.

The letter I mailed to Chelsea this weekend said "you have not been forgotten". That's it. One sheet of paper and a sharpie. Nothing that could give whoever censors her mail an excuse to throw my letter out.

Her birthday is December 17th. I added a reminder to my calendar to send one each December 1st, to allow for processing time through the prison mail. One stamp and one letter can make a difference in someone's life, and Amnesty International has recommended mailing prisoners on their birthday.

http://blog.amnestyusa.org/asia/on-your-birthday-you-are-not...

When the whole official world is against you, it'd be comforting to hear that there are people, even if strangers, who believe in you and appreciate you.

How about not touching on that at all? Surely she hears more than enough on that already and is confronted with it when she's not reading about it also.

Something that has nothing to do with her and her current situation, something that allows her to escape her situation at least in her mind for a little bit, would probably be welcome. If I were in that situation, I believe I would appreciate that anyway.

Probably a good idea. Yan wrote about her visit and she seemed interested in current affairs/etc. (plus writes articles, including one which went out on 3 July)

Is anyone surprised she's suicidal? Locked in solitary confinement, for a minimum of 8 years (probably a lot more), at the hands of an obviously vindictive government - I imagine that by now I would have tried to kill myself too.

It's still deplorable to me that you can force someone into solitary confinement for anything over a couple of days.

Well, a lot of the mechanisms of prison seem pretty counterproductive... 23 hours in the same room.

My understanding is that members of the military sign away a bunch of their rights but I don't understand how throwing somebody in jail for 20 years is a thing we came up with.

It came up as a consequence of the criminal justice system. That kind of punishment was meant for people who could not be left by themselves as they posed a very real threat to society: murderers, rapists, arsonists etc. Once the system is in place, its easy to just "add" to it. Making certain things severely punishable (e.g. the prosecution of Aaron Schwartz) just requires the lawmakers to categorize these new crimes in a certain way and not to invent the category itself.

Of course, if you go back further, punishments were invented by the ruling class to keep everyone else in line. The king could pretty much have anyone hanged if he wanted to and it took sometime before there were enough smart people in society to suggest that this was maybe not the best way to live.

Transgenders have an alarmingly high suicide rate even without those factors piled on.

Hopefully not too off topic, but I believe the preferred nomenclature is more along the lines of "People who are transgender" (though I could be wrong and would appreciate someone saying so)

"Person-first language" is a thing in special education- I wouldn't be surprised if that were preferred here. The idea behind it is that the adjective isn't the defining attribute of the person.

As a person who is male, I agree.

You know, thinking about it I wish this were focused on more. I think if more people had this mindset and just remembered that we're all people first we might be kinder and less hateful to one another. Focusing on what we have in common before the small differences that are a part of our identities. There's so much hate of others in the world and it makes me sad.

I've seen "trans people" and "transgender people" widely used by trans people, so I generally assume that they are okay.

It makes me wonder if the will of the people who want her pardoned could help her, or if it is actually hopeless.

Her best hope for a pardon will come at the end of President Obama's term. Legally, presidents can issue these at any time, but because of the possible political fallout the majority of them come during the "lame duck" period after an election.

https://www.justice.gov/pardon/gwbush-pardons#nov24-08

https://www.justice.gov/pardon/gwbush-commutations#novone

https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clinton-pardons#november21200...

https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clinton-commutations#novtwo

If you want to encourage Obama to do this, contact information for the White House can be found at https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/write-or-call

I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people she has to deal with 24/7 are self-professed "patriot" types who would not be troubled to lay plenty of indifference and insults upon her.

> Locked in solitary confinement

I thought she was out of solitary?

This part seems a little bit ironic "Though she would have preferred to keep her private information private".

Is that not why she's come into the public eye? For releasing private information that some people would have preferred to keep private?

This isn't a comment on whether her leak was the right thing to do or not, just the whole "Treat others like you want others to treat you".

Ask yourself what value to society do Chelsea create with her leak?

Then ask, what value does broadcasting her health status everywhere provide society?

Hopefully this will help inform you of the differences in these separate acts, since it seems to have blown right by you at light speed.

> Ask yourself what value to society do Chelsea create with her leak? > Then ask, what value does broadcasting her health status everywhere provide society?

(Not who you replied to, but...)

I believe Chelsea Manning deserves privacy for an issue such as this, but also hope that the situation will (at least) make more people contemplate the extreme nature of solitary. I would be undone fifty times by now if I were isolated by force.

You are entirely overlooking the question of whether the public should have the right to know the private information, which was what drove Manning's motivations.

"Information that some people would have preferred to keep private" is a general statement that could be applied to anything from a teenage girl's diary to an impending nuclear attack. To handwave that away is to make the entire matter meaningless.

The two cases are hardly comparable.

You're getting plenty of feedback here, but you might want to read up on "category error" as to your sense of the privacy concepts you use.

The problem with this is that Manning released, along with some things you could argue the public has a right to know, all the other data diplomats and spies had collected.

Did we all need to know salacious details about Muammar Gaddafi's "voluptuous" Ukrainian nurse? That seems very much the same kind of data to me.

Public figures, especially those with substantial power, have less of a right to privacy in general than random citizens.

You have confused human rights with governmental rights.

> Is that not why she's come into the public eye?

Yeah, for releasing someones health info. Do yourself a favor and do a little research before commenting on a public forum.

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