Personnel departments everywhere deal with people not machines. Failures are inevitable.Quote by: WithATwist
I find it perhaps more than a coincidence that the resistance to repealing 'don't ask don't tell' seems to have strengthened since Manning was arrested. Evidence of profiling?Besides, the motives for treason are varied and individual, ranging from idealism, to disenchantment, to opportunism. How do you calculate when someone will become disenchanted or disillusioned, and then what sort of actions they will or will not take when feeling that way?
I think you must expect them to make good decisions or defer them to their immediate superior. They are relied on to do just that. Manning ignored the chain of command.You're probably quite correct, "allow" is not the correct word. But the point is, he is 22 and we can't expect someone of that age to be making perfectly good decisions in each and every situation.
General Paul Tibbets was 30, his bombardier, Col. Thomas W. Ferebee was 26. Major General Charles W. Sweeney was 26 and his bombardier, Lt. Col. Kermit Beahan, turned 27 the day he released Fat Man over Nagasaki after the primary target, Kokura, was covered by clouds. He and Sweeney conferred with the weaponeer, Commander Frederick Ashworth, 33, and the three decided to attempt the secondary target, Nagasaki.
With whom did Manning discuss the stealing and release of files? For sure, it seems, he trusted Adrian Lamo. Lamo betrayed the trust Manning had in him.
When you proposed a counter factual I figured any response would be spurious, but it didn't stop me. I figure it won't stop you either.Such arguments are spurious, and your link is based solely upon US military figures of losses of military personnel, not loss of life per se, but only the loss of US military life. This is a loaded (biased) analysis.
Agendas were not a secret that an inner member exposing them would have altered things. See? Spurious.I can easily argue that had the US entered WWII earlier than it did, that the US military would have lost far greater numbers of personnel, than waiting to be geared-up for war, when they did enter. Had they entered earlier, would have been suicide, for America was not geared-up for war, had only remnants of equipment left-over from WWI, and industry and the workforce were only just starting recovery from the Great Depression.
And if the rabbit hadn't stopped to take a shit the turtle would have lost.As it was, they went into combat against a superior force, technologically, attempting to make-up ground along the way....Sherman tanks were antiquated, and no match for the German Tigers, for example. And if Hitler hadn't invaded Russia and gotten stuck in the winter outside Moscow, there would have been a very different war. We won by more good luck, than good management, and that luck was Hitler's poor management and grandiose ideas of fighting two main fronts. Had he left Russia alone, we would have quite probably been pounded into the sea.
The point of this exercise was to identify the act of the inner member's exposure of Hitler's intentions as traitorous or heroic. Depends on which side you choose.
I have this thought. I fear that Pfc Manning was dis-empowered and frustrated because of it. He became a target of manipulation as the hijacker pilots of 911, Scott Roeder who assassinated Dr. George Miller the abortion doctor, Maj. Nidal Hasan, the psychiatrist who killed 12 soldiers and a civilian at Fort Hood, and any other suicide bomber that is primed and aimed to destruction by a respected peer group promoting the idea of self-righteous martyrdom.
Manning escapes, for the moment, the murder charges. But he is on the edge. His personality was ripe for manipulating if not by the densest of his immediate superiors, who have surely not been promoted, then by the ideals of those not in as trusted a position as he but similar in personality traits. Perhaps Assange himself.
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