Transgender Treason

The NYT deserves some credit for publishing this piece. I'll even forgive the use of Manning's preferred pronouns and titles in this case, as it probably makes the message easier for the intended audience to hear. Though I might generally be willing to go along with whatever someone wants to be called, if they ask nicely, in this case I think the only appropriate thing is to show scorn for the traitor. But the audience would reject the whole argument on the basis that it was 'mean,' I guess, though this is someone who deserves scorn and disrespect to the highest degree.

Perhaps the NYT's audience will understand why a bit better after reading these facts.

When Ms. Manning transmitted 750,000 secret military records and State Department cables to WikiLeaks in 2010, she not only jeopardized continuing missions and disrupted American diplomacy. She also put an untold number of innocent people’s lives in danger.

According to The New Yorker, when the United States tried to locate “hundreds” of Afghans named in the documents and move them to safety, “many could not be found, or were in environments too dangerous to reach.” When pressed by a journalist about the possibility of redacting the names of Afghans who cooperated with the United States military, Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, reportedly replied: “Well, they’re informants. So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”

Meantime, Mr. Assange gave a Russian Holocaust denier 90,000 of the cables. That man, who goes by the pen name Israel Shamir, delivered a trove to the Belarussian dictatorship, which then utilized the material to detain opposition activists. In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe used a leaked cable detailing a United States Embassy meeting with opposition figures as pretext for an investigation into “treasonous collusion.”

Yet from the moment United States military prosecutors charged Ms. Manning with violating the Espionage Act in 2010, progressives have hailed her as a folk hero.

The charge itself was a gift from the Obama-era DOD. It should have been treason, with a side order of responsibility for recklessly endangering hundreds of lives -- an untold number of which may have been lost.