That has nothing to do with Manning's criminal record. He is a convicted felon who endangered innocent people by breaking into classified military computers to publicly expose military secrets, including the identify of innocent people who were sources of information in a war. He is a leftist anti-US felon, not a freedom fighter. Almost everything defending him that we read is slanted leftist rhetoric evading his criminality to try to turn him into a martyr. He's a felon who committed serious crimes, not a martyr on behalf of some kind of freedom.

The best defense against a tyrannical and statist government like we have now is just to stay out of its way and just be under the radar. That means basically to keep ones mouth shut when it comes to going against the system. Its a cowards way of dealing with our government, but laying down in front of a tank trying to run you over isnt a good idea.

I am not coming from a leftist leaning at all. I just dislike the power hungry statist government we currently have that gets away with so many rights violations that it is actually funny that they would feel that their transgressions should be permitted .

If you find yourself in such a situation you had better have a good enough memory to remember to get a lawyer. Cynically telling them that you "have a terrible memory" and don't remember when you do would make you more suspicious and get you in a lot of trouble. If professional investigators have a reason to target you for questioning you had better have professional legal advice yourself. You can't blow it off with flippant remarks.

He did it to himself by committing serious crimes for his leftist political ideology at war with the US military. He is a convicted felon who refuses to cooperate with the justice system in telling what he knows about others complicit in his crimes. He is not innocent. This is not a matter of coercing him to "help them nail" someone for political motives without regard to evidence of criminality. Stop trying to make this clown into a an innocent victim. His anarchistic criminality endangering the lives of innocent people is not on behalf of freedom. The left wants to portray this felon as a martyr. Don't fall for it.

so if manning doesnt help them nail assange, then manning goes to jail. Great system we have here. Manning should have gotten the hell out of dodge the minute he was freed by obama and never come back

I have a terrible memory, so I wont be much help

The Fifth Amendment protects you only from testifying against yourself. They can ask you questions you aren't subject to prosecution over, especially if, in Manning's case, the subject has already been tried and so can't be subjected to double jeopardy.

You also don't have to testify against a spouse in most cases, at least if there isn't a conspiracy. Maybe the next bizarre twist will be Manning marrying Assange in the latest rationalization. A fate worse than the British torture.

If you are ever confronted by a Federal interrogation consult a lawyer immediately. Appealing to what may sound like common sense, like the fifth amendment, will get you in a lot of trouble. Legal procedures do not follow common sense, and the lawyers know how to manipulate them. You don't.

If you know you have done nothing wrong it may be tempting to talk to them to set the record straight and help, especially when they play the friendly good-cop bad-cop game. But there is too much of a history now on official abuse of the system by politically motivated, abusive officials who are out to "make a case" and not concerned with fairness and honesty.

Yes, that is what he was indicted for by the grand jury. Now they have to prove it in court. If he helped Manning hack into the computers he committed a crime along with Manning.

Use 5th amendment. Who knows how the government will use the info they will get

That is what the governments position is

"The pervasive bureaucratic mentality is an intellectual problem.'

Do you think it is?

I'd rather believe it is the manifestation of the DS MOD, in which necessary activities are replaced by paper pushing and useless paragraphs. Nothing to do with intellect.

All of which are aimed at creating a system where those in power are never questioned about accountability.

"Cooperating" with a grand jury means telling the truth in a criminal investigation, not "cooperating" to help a prosecutor's case no matter what it is. Manning is a convicted felon still hiding the full extent of the criminality, not an innocent person afraid he might have a faulty memory and only correctly state 99%. His imprisonment for non-cooperation is for his still aiding the crime through a refusal to tell the truth at all.

If you are ever confronted by Federal investigators then before telling them anything you should immediately consult a lawyer to protect your legal rights.

The Manning affair was about criminal breach of military security exposing and endangering innocent people during a war, not a general "helping citizens" against growing oppressive government. Not everything the government does is wrong. Manning endangered people; he did not help anyone with his leftist "war crimes" claims, and does nothing to advance a proper government.

If Assange was part of that then he shares the guilt regardless of what else he has done.

Bureaucratic incompetence does not excuse criminal behavior. The military is no exception from bureaucracy: the acronym "SNAFU" -- "situation normal, all ..." -- came from the US military in WWII.

Observing Manning's strange behavior should have led to some kind of oversight, but hacking into secure computers was beyond what his strange behavior could predict for either his ability or future actions.

The people around him had limited ability for judgment and limited and ambiguous sense of what they were responsible to do. They are, after all, in a bureaucracy. But the criminal activity of breaking into secure computers to steal and disseminate military secrets is something that everyone understands to be wrong, including Manning, and none of his colleagues in the military knew he was doing that. His confused personal state did not justify or cause the theft committed for political purposes.

The pervasive bureaucratic mentality is an intellectual problem, with philosophical causes, and ultimately leads to events such as the Taggert Tunnel disaster.

But I disagree that citizens can be imprisoned for simply not cooperating with our government's claims against someone else. Thats like demanding that one answer questions and then imprisoning them for not being 100% accurate in the answers. If interrogated, I would have to say essentially that I remember nothing, just in case my memory happened to be faulty

I think we have different views on this somehow. The government is acting against the citizens, and hiding it. We need to keep that from happening, and it seems to me Manning and Assange and Snowden are helping the citizens, not hurting them- yet they are harrassed and their freedoms violated. This is wrong.

His refusal to cooperate with a grand jury investigation is not about "endless investigations" pursued for the purpose of persecution. Assange has been indicted for a specific crime with specific evidence that he illegally collaborated with Manning, a convicted felon already established as guilty for the same crime. Nothing Manning has done can be defended in the name of "freedom". Government does have a responsibility to investigate and prosecute criminal behavior.

They are keeping Assange in jail rather than bringing him back for trial because his lawyers are fighting the extradition in the courts, not to avoid the whole issue. They want him back here. In the meantime the British authorities are apparently trying to break him through imposing abusive "punishment" outside the proper purpose of the prison system. He is being held in prison for trial as a flight risk, not to be punished, let alone tortured.

Manning stole and exposed genuine military secrets in time of war, endangering many innocent people. Of course that should be illegal. "The ends justify the means" is not a proper moral principle; it does not excuse anything that someone does in the name of being "right", which is anarchy.

"Whistleblowing" does not properly include or excuse politically motivated crimes. There is no place in a proper legal system for the concept of "political crimes" at all. No actions should be 'criminalized' for political reasons and no crimes should be excused for political reasons.

Much of what is exposed today by genuine whistleblowers is not illegal activity. The problem is that it is policy under the law, not an aberration. The debate is over proper principles and functions of government, which must be pursued by intellectual means, not leftist propaganda covering for their own criminality.

Manning's criminal acts were politically motivated in the name of the leftist "peace" ideology. When someone takes on any kind of government through deliberate criminality he had better know that there are consequences for his anarchy. Claiming to be morally right after being caught will not save him, and leftist causes, including the contradictory "peace" movement, are not morally in the right at all. Manning's fantasy included boasting about what he had done, which led to his arrest.

Stealing and exposing military secrets while in a war has been "recast" by the left to be "whistleblowing". Manning's hacking into and stealing everything he could get from classified secure military computers certainly was a crime and should be. Manning boasted that he was motivated by his leftist "anti-war" "peace" ideology, which is used to excuse anything they do as exposing "wrongdoing" and "war crimes". It's all rhetoric trying to cover deliberate criminal activity.

Correct.

That line has become a slogan. But when I first saw/heard Nicholson utter the words, it was a turn off.

He is a great actor but the bombastic way that sentence was supposed to underline what was going on did not accomplish the effect it was intended. You just thought "What a jerk".

This is my personal opinion and I respect anybody's take on it, despite my note.

The rape charges, whether true or not, were over a long time ago. They dragged him out of the Ecuadorian embassy in part for the prosecution against him in the Manning affair stealing military secrets, for which there was already a sealed indictment and a pending extradition warrant that he has been fighting in the British courts since the raid. The US indictment was unsealed the day of the raid. They could take him because he had just lost his asylum and naturalized Ecuadorian citizenship over other hacking charges involving Ecuador. A lot of governments have been embarrassed by Wikileaks, but if he did what he is accused of in the Manning affair he went far beyond whistleblowing.

"But Trump ran, at least in part, on a promise to get rid of the Deep State."

Yes, he did but he probably had no credible grasp on the extent of it and how deeply it was ingrained. We are finding out drip by drip (usually after the fact) where torpedoing Trump's efforts are originating, and sometimes even the players.

It took many decades to build the DS, its tentacles extended and fortified during Bush and Obama. That fortress can't be dismantled in three years, with the headwind the left is putting up against it.

they will keep assange in jail until he just dies, avoiding the whole issue.

I think that no matter how a whistleblower gets his data, it should NOT be illegal. Remember, the whole idea of a whistleblower is that they are uncovering illegal things that someone else has done but covered up.