MaSaRa

He is in solitary, gets the one hour exercise room to walk around in every day, has to respond "yes" every 5 minutes to his guards from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m., is awakened if he turns towards the wall or covers his face, cannot converse with his guards or other prisoners, and was denied sheets and pillows. This despite not being on suicide watch.

He is an accused, not a convict. I cannot imagine what contact with other prisoners would do to jeopardize him or his security unless I am unaware of threats, which is possible.

Unless his safety is threatened he belongs in the general population. He was not suicidal when he went in, but the very conditions of his confinement have caused a deterioration in his mental condition.

And what he did was illegal. I don't like his Gen Y attitude towards all information being free. But I detest the way a journalist can get a story exactly right only to hear Obama's spokesman call it false, and then have to rely on a guy like Manning to show that the Obama administration is lying. I remember Nixon telling us there were no US military actions in Cambodia.

But I also detest the NYT trying to distinguish what they do from what Wikileaks does. The bright line is supposedly "troop movements", and yet the NYT pushes that line around pretty robustly. See this story from just last week:
"The proposal, described by American officials in Washington and Afghanistan, would escalate military activities inside Pakistan, where the movement of American forces has been largely prohibited because of fears of provoking a backlash."

Personally I approve of this type of reporting; it exposes a secret policy proposal that was being pursued without public debate even though most Americans are probably not in favor of opening a new front in an unpopular war that is supposed to be a on a timetable to end soon. It's like giving your landlord two weeks notice and then adding on a sunroom one night. But this type of reporting is crucial, it makes the public debate not only more informed but actually possible.

Manning released info of what happened in the past. While it has surely compromised intelligence sources it has not outed any specific future missions the way the NYT did. Now the mission outed by the Times has not even been approved yet, so no troops on the ground are in danger. But the distinction between past and future is the key one for judging damage. So far I have not seen evidence that Manning's acts caused specific casualties. Grousing about it, but no evidence of it.