Saturday, December 1, 2012

The Leak of Classified Military Information


          Bradley Manning, the GI responsible for leaking classified military documents, recently admitted to making a noose during his imprisonment in Kuwait, according to an expository article by Ben Nuckols and David Dishneau. In the article, Manning is quoted telling the jury that he “certainly made a noose, the sheet noose in particular”. After he was arrested in Kuwait, he felt the lowest he had ever felt, which is what provoked him to make the noose. Bradley said that he did not feel like hurting himself after he left Kuwait, but he was still treated as a suicide risk for eight days,and then upgraded to the prevention of injury status after he transferred to the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va. Nuckols and Dishneau explained that Manning's lawyers are now fighting to get all charges dropped against him for “illegal punishment” that lasted “past the time he was having suicidal thoughts”. The military defends that they were trying to protect Manning by taking his clothing and shackling him when he was outside of his cell. If he was capable of making a noose out of a sheet, he could just as easily make a noose out of his clothing.
          Like the leaks from Manning, the book No Easy Day, an account of the raid on Osama Bin Laden, tells classified information that contradicts the Obama administration's account, if the information provided by the author under the pseudonym Mark Owen is true. The article the New York Times ran about the book describes that Osama was “shot in the head when he peered out of his bedroom”, while the Obama administration told that the shot in the stairwell missed, and Bin Laden was not shot until they reached his bedroom. It should not make a difference to anyone whether he was shot in his room or looking out, but because of the administration's supposed lie, people feel scandalized. While the book and the leaks of information are severely different in many ways, some Americans' reactions are very similar. The military's actions are always with the purpose of protecting America and its citizens, and the citizens must remember that fact despite the leaked documents. 

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