and why you should ask yourself why you care about Bradley Manning.
(controversial comment removed, bad snark, bad joke, read the comment section for details, my apologies to those who found a way to be offended, my points below and still valid below the jump)
Let's get something straight here. Bradley Manning did not apply for a job when he signed up for the military. He enlisted himself to service. He went in, put on the uniform, and signed years of his life away to serve his country in whatever way his superiors deemed fit. He made himself property of the military, and is now accused of betraying it. But that's actually a moot point.
There is a very intelligent diarist on the recommended list, asking why we don't care about Bradley Manning. Like any of we flawwed human beings, that diarist misunderstands the most basic circumstances of the case;
Bradley Manning is not a whistle-blower. Whistle-blowers are very admirable people. They find out something bad and let the whole world know about the evil that was committed. But that is not what Bradley Manning did. Bradley Manning did not comb through the tens of thousands of documents that were released. He probably didn't even read more than a few of those classified memos. Instead, he grabbed as many compressed-secrets as possible and dumped as much as possible onto Wikileaks. This isn't an attempt to right a wrong, this was an attempt to cause as much grief for his country as possible.
Let's be clear, and the trial will clear this up as it proceeds; for Bradley Manning to have known what information he was dumping would have required him to spend probably half of his adult life going through each of the classified memos. He did not blow the whistle on this-incident or -that-incident, insted he dumped as much classified material as he could get his hands on to cause as much grief as possible for his country. If it was the Russian or Chinese spy agency and not Wikileaks that he passed this information onto there would be no question about it that he committed treason through espionage.
I can say with the upmost certainty that I couldn't care less about Bradley Manning. The fact that people do on this site just goes to show how imperfect we all are.