The Other McCain

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Anonymous Compares Bradley Manning to Nelson Mandela (Irony Alert)

Posted on | December 12, 2013 | 71 Comments

In that analogy, President Obama is P.W. Botha and laws to punish disobedient soldiers are apartheid. Remember that Bradley Manning was the emotionally disturbed Army private who illegally provided classified U.S. documents to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks.

Conservatives are often accused of “simplistic” thinking, and liberals claim they’re all about “nuance” and “critical thinking,” but there are layers of nuance that seem to pass right over the heads of these idiot anarchists who mindlessly admire Manning. When my own son took the oath at Fort Meade, security was on high alert because there was a hearing in the Manning case that day, and the Army didn’t know if the Anonymous protesters might try some real-life “civil disobedience.” My son swore an oath that day to obey the orders of his Commander-in-Chief, whose politics and policies I have frequently criticized, but who is nonetheless President of the United States.

This is what democracy and the rule of law require. Citizens of a democracy cannot selectively decide which laws to obey, imbue their crimes with political significance, and then claim that enforcement of the law is unjust. And the security of a free state is always dependent on the service of those like my son who are bound by oath to obey orders, without regard for mere political controversies.  While there are many decisions of the Obama administration that I have criticized, the prosecution of Bradley Manning is to be applauded, because if our soldiers cannot be trusted to obey orders, none of us are safe.

My soldier son and his mother.

If Bradley Manning is a courageous hero, then is every soldier who obeys orders a cowardly villain? This is what the anarchists of Anonymous are saying by their support of Manning, whose crimes were heinous and whose punishment is thoroughly deserved.

Speaking of punishments thoroughly deserved, a friend sent me an article about the “PayPal 14” hackers whom I mentioned yesterday. It may be necessary to remind you of the sequence of events: Manning illegally provided classified U.S. documents to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks; PayPal suspended the WikiLeaks account; Anonymous then launched distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks to shut down PayPal. In other words, a company’s business was attacked because of their refusal to support Manning’s criminal activity.

Alas, those digital terrorists weren’t so Anonymous after all, and it was only a few months until the feds busted them. This May article by Huffington Post writers Jerry Smith and Ryan J. Reilly oozed with sympathy for the “Pay Pal 14” hackers:

Before he was charged in July 2011 with aiding the hacker group Anonymous, Josh Covelli lived what he considered the life of an ordinary 26-year-old. He spent countless hours on the Internet. He had a girlfriend. He was a student and employee at Devry University in Dayton, Ohio.
But after federal authorities accused him and 13 other people of helping launch a cyberattack against the online payment service PayPal, Covelli faced potentially 15 years in prison, and his life began to unravel.
His girlfriend broke up with him. He struggled to find an employer willing to hire an accused computer hacker. His friends “wanted nothing to do with me,” he said, and he suffered from bouts of paranoia — “looking out windows, not sure who to trust” — before checking into a behavioral health center for three days.
“It was as if I got kicked off a cliff,” Covelli, now 28, told The Huffington Post in an interview. . . .

Well, boo hoo hoo. Maybe if Josh Covelli had sought “behavioral health” treatment sooner, he would have realized how crazy he was to think that committing crime on behalf of WikiLeaks was a smart idea. But, hey, let’s all be sympathetic to stupid criminals:

Some knew each other before the indictment, but only by online nicknames such as “Anthrophobic” and “Reaper.” They had never met in person until Sept. 1, 2011, when they made their initial court appearance together.
One defendant, Tracy Ann Valenzuela, a single mother and massage therapist, told a local ABC station in 2011 that she got involved in the PayPal attack while reading the news online.
“I saw something about PayPal shutting down payments to Wikileaks, and I clicked on some other site and joined a protest,” she said. “And next thing I knew, my house was surrounded by guns.” . . .

“I clicked on some other site and joined a protest” — a protest on behalf of criminals, a protest that involved criminal acts intended to deprive PayPal of revenue, because the company refused to process donations intended to support the criminal Julian Assange.

Tracy Ann Valenzuela: Her defense? She’s stupid.

Tracy Ann Valenzuela’s defense is that she was too stupid to realize that DDOS attacks are a crime. Perhaps we need to put all the stupid people in prison, just to be on the safe side, because otherwise they might log onto the Internet and commit cybercrime.

Let me propose an alternative theory of Tracy Ann Valenzuela’s crime: (a) she knew damned well this DDOS “protest” was criminal, but (b) she had contempt for the law and (c) she thought she could get away with breaking the law, because … Anonymous! and (d) oops.

Reminds me of the 18-year-old who thought she could get away with having sex in a school toilet stall with a 14-year-old. Oops.

It’s weird how millions of Americans go through life without ever being arrested for sex offenses or cybercrimes, but whenever the liberal media want to portray some criminal as a victim of social injustice, they always manage to find a way to do it:

In interviews with The Huffington Post, defendants in the PayPal case said they have spent the past two years burdened by pre-trial conditions that restricted their Internet usage. Many also struggled to secure employment.
“When you’re applying for a job and someone Googles you, you have a lot of explaining to do when you want to point out that you were standing up for free speech and a worthy cause and the government says you’re a cyber terrorist,” said Graham E. Archer, an attorney who represents Ethan Miles, one of the defendants.
Archer said being on pre-trial release has been “extraordinarily stressful” for Miles. Court records note that he spent time at a mental health facility. . . .

What? Ethan Miles “spent time at a mental health facility”? It’s hard to get a job if “the government says you’re a cyber terrorist”?

Ethan Miles: A criminal who is crazy.

Strip away the HuffPo’s sympathetic spin — and the lawyer’s claim that the kook Ethan Miles thought DDOS attacks were a way of “standing up for free speech” — and what you get is this: Crazy people commit crimes and nobody wants to hire crazy criminals.

Where do these crazy and/or stupid criminals get the idea that any time there is a protest — because somebody said it’s about “peace,” or “free speech” or “social justice” — they can just join the protest and be exempted from potential negative consequences? Pardon me for thinking maybe they get that idea from the liberal media:

Most Americans have never heard of Chris Hani or Oliver Tambo, both of whom died in 1993, and there was no fanfare in the U.S. media when Arthur Goldreich died two years ago. Since Nelson Mandela’s death last Thursday, the names of his former comrades in the anti-apartheid struggle have been omitted from the media narrative. The MSNBC hostess who last week enthusiastically credited Mandela with having “singlehandedly” ended apartheid was merely reducing to its ridiculous essence a myth that has become ubiquitous. What has been carefully omitted from the media myth — along with the names of many of Mandela’s colleagues in the African National Congress — is that the ANC was a communist-dominated party closely allied with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
The controversy that erupted Tuesday after President Obama shook hands with Cuban dictator Raul Castro at a Mandela memorial in South Africa should have provided an opportunity to explain the history that has been deleted from the media’s Mandela myth. After all, Fidel Castro’s communist regime sent tens of thousands of soldiers to Angola to fight in a civil war where South Africa’s apartheid government sent troops into combat against Soviet-backed Marxists. The fact that Moscow and Havana spent the final 15 years of the Cold War fighting to spread communism in sub-Saharan Africa, and that Pretoria was a key Western ally against that effort, got no mention in the obituary praise for Mandela, who remained imprisoned until 1990. . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator. Maybe I’m “on the wrong side of history,” but at least I’m not a stupid criminal kook.

Also, it’s not a crime to hit my tip jar: PayPal is your friend!





 

Category: Crime, Culture, History, Terrorism

Comments

71 Responses to “Anonymous Compares Bradley Manning to Nelson Mandela (Irony Alert)”

  1. Quartermaster
    December 12th, 2013 @ 6:29 pm

    Were that the case, there would have been little upon which to take him to Court Martial.

  2. Steve Skubinna
    December 12th, 2013 @ 6:42 pm

    “If Bradley Manning is a courageous hero, then is every soldier who obeys orders a cowardly villain?”

    Ah, now you’re getting it. Surprised you could be so obtuse. Remember, these are leftists who spent the past ten years gritting their teeth and claiming to support the baby killing racist terrorist troops, all the while hatin.g that it was bad political theater to spit on them.

    Incidentally, Anonymous is missing a huge point here: civil disobedience is about opposing government policy, by opposing government entities. PayPal is a private enterprise. Likewise, so is StratFor. Either these people don’t understand the difference, or their expressed morality is just posturing… hmmmm, tough call.

  3. Steve Skubinna
    December 12th, 2013 @ 6:45 pm

    A valid point, except that Manning acted out of rage over a broken relationship, not personal conviction.

  4. Dana
    December 12th, 2013 @ 6:55 pm

    Given that simply being homosexual was not a reason to den clearance, the obvious question is: how was the rest of his file? He had no past criminal record, and I’ve heard nothing negative about him until he started to go bonkers, so it’s not to much of a surprise he was cleared. The problem is that he wasn’t yanked as soon as problems developed.

  5. dwduck
    December 12th, 2013 @ 7:23 pm

    My (admittedly poorly stated) point was that saying Manning disobeyed/refused orders gives him too much credit, because it takes more stones to actually say “no” to someone than it does to slip some files to a crapweasel.

  6. dwduck
    December 12th, 2013 @ 7:25 pm

    He was also granted access to way too much stuff in the first place.

  7. rmnixondeceased
    December 12th, 2013 @ 7:29 pm

    I’m dancing with happiness at the aptness of this post!

  8. cmdr358
    December 12th, 2013 @ 8:14 pm

    Probably pay for it? Why surely it must be included as mandated coverage in all Bronze Plans.

    After all, as our more progressive counterparts will tell us, gender reassignment is covered under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It’s why the 14th was written in the first place. :-

  9. Bob Belvedere
    December 12th, 2013 @ 8:19 pm

    Manning deserves to be hung.

  10. cmdr358
    December 12th, 2013 @ 8:21 pm

    As far as the PayPal 14 having troubles finding work- bullshit. They just can’t find jobs using computers. Who can blame a company for not wanting one of these putz’s to have access to their network?
    As Ted Knight said in Caddy Shack, ” The world needs ditch diggers too …..”

  11. Bob Belvedere
    December 12th, 2013 @ 8:24 pm

    I’d like to see them dig their own graves.

  12. debbywitt
    December 12th, 2013 @ 9:07 pm

    RT @rsmccain: Anonymous Compares Bradley Manning to Nelson Mandela (Irony Alert) http://t.co/w3kicvpRqa cc @AmPowerBlog @instapundit @rdbre…

  13. Steve Skubinna
    December 12th, 2013 @ 9:09 pm

    Purgatory must agree with you. You were never this laid back and hip whilst amongst the living.

  14. BobBelvedere
    December 12th, 2013 @ 9:49 pm

    RT @rsmccain: #Anonymous Logic: Bradley Manning = Nelson Mandela! PayPal = Apartheid! DDOS = “Free Speech”! Or something … http://t.co/w3…

  15. richard mcenroe
    December 12th, 2013 @ 11:18 pm

    If Hasan was only “workplace violence” Manning was only “stealing office supplies.”

  16. M. Thompson
    December 13th, 2013 @ 12:03 am

    That’s no excuse. He should have requested removal from duties on medical grounds. There is no difference between a regulation or an order at an actual level. Either way, he made a decision to give the information up.

    If he was really wanting to change things, I am damn sure that certain Congresscritters would have taken the same information and used it against the Administration a few years back.

  17. rmnixondeceased
    December 13th, 2013 @ 8:32 am

    Growth in knowledge comes with death.

  18. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 13th, 2013 @ 12:03 pm

    I do not mean because mental hospital time is easier. We should study the criminally mentally ill like lab rats.

    Either that or spare those poor rabbits and test cosmetics for toxicity on “Chelsea” Manning. Win win.

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