Bradley Manning was submitted to sleep deprivation & extreme isolation, both of which are widely regarded as torture by civilized people. Given that it seems reasonable for Snowden to believe he will be tortured on his return to the US and unreasonable for someone to say that he certainly won't be tortured.
Not everyone who is convicted of a crime by the government is tortured and not every trial is a mocking pretense. Maybe, just maybe, Edward Snowden is speaking through the filter of his own prejudices and biases, which may not necessarily 100% reflect reality.
Maybe we should put it this way: the last person that the U.S.A. got its hands on that caused a similar amount of embarrassment to the U.S. government was brutally tortured.
Snowden would prefer not to find out if that trend is going to continue.
What you call brutal torture is certainly nothing anybody wants to experience, but the implication that it is legally unprecedented or obviously illegal is not correct, particularly for someone who is both subject to UCMJ and is reasonably deemed a suicide risk.
Nice torture justification, bro. You should be proud of yourself: you've stood up for humans beings torturing other human beings. Probably the highlight of your life to date.
Hint: nobody has ever said they thought Manning was a suicide risk except for his torturers. All qualified medical personnel that have ever examined him (including the prison psychologist) have insisted that he wasn't. Hint 2: doing sleep deprivation and humiliation is not the way to reduce someone's chance of suicide, if you honestly believed they were a risk. Which no one did.
You seem awfully sure about this. Being a US citizen myself I would certainly hope you're correct, but given the excesses that the government has already hidden or excused with "but... terrorists!!! fear!!!" I think there is an outside chance that he has legitimate cause for concern.
It's not an outside chance. The last guy who leaked classified US military information to the press to expose a systemic coverup of abuses was tortured for several years prior to his trial beginning:
Additionally, Obama himself declared him (Manning) guilty in public before his trial even began. (I wish I was making this up.)
It's not speculation. We've watched it happen, and recently. They are condemned before the trial even begins, and denied basic human rights from the outset - rights we shouldn't even deny convicted mass murderers.
It's an incredible shame for everyone who used to be proud to be from the USA.
> The last guy who leaked classified US military information to the press to expose a systemic coverup of abuses was tortured for several years prior to his trial beginning:
Last time I checked May -> April was still 11 months, and definitely not "several years".
> Additionally, Obama himself declared him (Manning) guilty in public before his trial even began. (I wish I was making this up.)
As far as I can tell from Googling, he said in a conversation, in the context of the rule of law, the "he broke the law". And that was it.
Am I missing something?
The rest of the context from the sites Google finds seems to indicate that Manning can't possibly get a fair trial, because the officers who would have to decide his guilt would treat that as some kind of order. Which is simply untrue, as evidenced by Manning's own reaction by asking for a bench trial.
If he had asked for a jury trial he would have had many more people to possibly conceive of his innocence. And the jury pool would have contained enlisted members as well, not just officers.
By asking for a bench trial he's one, and only one, commissioned officer away from being found guilty. That would be an insane choice, if this officer were really that susceptible to finding Manning guilty simply because Obama failed to use the word "allegedly" in a conversation.
Luckily, as Manning realizes since he's actually in the freaking military, that isn't the case at all.
