These are hard times indeed for anyone who loves Israel. Where are the Rabbis? That a sect purportedly devoted to Hebrew scriptures has so completely forgotten Micah beggars the imagination. Someone badly needs to remind them about kindness, justice, and walking humbly with their God.
Not sure consuming large amounts of water and electricity will be the best indicators of a nuclear weapons program. It's going to be information that will be harder to come by, such as the level to which they are able to enrich uranium. How much of their well-advertised enrichment program is beyond the prying eyes of the IAEA? Hard to tell, which induces Israeli & Western paranoia.
Then it's a matter of weaponization -- "right-sizing" a device for missile or bomb delivery. How much can usefully be done underground is open to question.
Espionage as defined by the UCMJ (Article 106a) can still be the main charge against Manning, and he is unlikely to escape conviction. It's a broad definition that appears to conform with the known facts. Whether Manning dealt directly with Assange probably doesn't matter, as the classified material he downloaded certainly ended up on Wikileaks. A lesser charge would relate to divulging classified information to someone not authorized to receive it, which could still carry quite a bit of jail time. Manning seems to have made the wrong decision, confiding in Adrian Lamo; I haven't seen/heard any evidence that anyone in the military was close to discovering what he had done.
The conditions of his incarceration have indeed been far too harsh, and I share your hope that he will be better-treated in the future.
Although I'm "in the business" and can never condone unauthorized disclosures of classified information, I was not unhappy to see the video "Collateral Murder" appear on the Internet, apparently thanks to Manning & Wikileaks. I sincerely hope it prompted the US Army to reexamine its rules of engagement.
Juan, the irony is that it's been widely accepted for some time (hasn't it?) that Bin Laden and al-Qaeda went to war with the US in response to our permanent military presence in close proximity to the holy places of Islam since 1990. Seems a convoluted strategy to 1) announce your goal, the expulsion of the "crusaders" from Muslim lands; 2) carry out a spectacular act of terror within the US, the purpose of which is to 3) provoke us into an even greater deployment of US military forces into Muslim lands, where 4) al-Qaeda can get at us.
As a matter of fact there was quite a bit of Israeli provocation prior to the Six-Day War, directed in particular at Syria. See _Defending the Holy Land_ by Zeev Maoz. The theme of this huge, well-researched book is that from the start Israel has defaulted to the military option in its neighborhood relations.
These are hard times indeed for anyone who loves Israel. Where are the Rabbis? That a sect purportedly devoted to Hebrew scriptures has so completely forgotten Micah beggars the imagination. Someone badly needs to remind them about kindness, justice, and walking humbly with their God.
Not sure consuming large amounts of water and electricity will be the best indicators of a nuclear weapons program. It's going to be information that will be harder to come by, such as the level to which they are able to enrich uranium. How much of their well-advertised enrichment program is beyond the prying eyes of the IAEA? Hard to tell, which induces Israeli & Western paranoia.
Then it's a matter of weaponization -- "right-sizing" a device for missile or bomb delivery. How much can usefully be done underground is open to question.
Espionage as defined by the UCMJ (Article 106a) can still be the main charge against Manning, and he is unlikely to escape conviction. It's a broad definition that appears to conform with the known facts. Whether Manning dealt directly with Assange probably doesn't matter, as the classified material he downloaded certainly ended up on Wikileaks. A lesser charge would relate to divulging classified information to someone not authorized to receive it, which could still carry quite a bit of jail time. Manning seems to have made the wrong decision, confiding in Adrian Lamo; I haven't seen/heard any evidence that anyone in the military was close to discovering what he had done.
The conditions of his incarceration have indeed been far too harsh, and I share your hope that he will be better-treated in the future.
Although I'm "in the business" and can never condone unauthorized disclosures of classified information, I was not unhappy to see the video "Collateral Murder" appear on the Internet, apparently thanks to Manning & Wikileaks. I sincerely hope it prompted the US Army to reexamine its rules of engagement.
Juan, the irony is that it's been widely accepted for some time (hasn't it?) that Bin Laden and al-Qaeda went to war with the US in response to our permanent military presence in close proximity to the holy places of Islam since 1990. Seems a convoluted strategy to 1) announce your goal, the expulsion of the "crusaders" from Muslim lands; 2) carry out a spectacular act of terror within the US, the purpose of which is to 3) provoke us into an even greater deployment of US military forces into Muslim lands, where 4) al-Qaeda can get at us.
As a matter of fact there was quite a bit of Israeli provocation prior to the Six-Day War, directed in particular at Syria. See _Defending the Holy Land_ by Zeev Maoz. The theme of this huge, well-researched book is that from the start Israel has defaulted to the military option in its neighborhood relations.