Bradley Manning's Post-Sentencing Statement
"<i>I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized in our efforts to meet this risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity.</i>"<p>One of my best friends spoke similarly when I met him after his tour as a Marine in the first Gulf War in 1991. Based on what he saw, after long introspection, he applied for conscientious objector status. He felt he was sent around the world not to protect his country's freedom or safety, but government and corporate interests. He felt his conscience could only oppose all wars he could possibly imagine his country fighting. He could only learn that by going, not from what his government told him before going.<p>The situation today seems more objectionable than then. I feel like the more we learn about the government's actions, the yet more objectionable they seem.<p>I shudder when I connect the data point then to today's and extrapolate a few years out.<p>But I still take inspiration from people who honor the Constitution over what seems opposing policy.<p>(Edit: since people are asking about what happened to my friend, instead of evaluating his conscientious objector intent, they gave him bureaucratic run-around for years until it was easier for him to get his Honorable Discharge on schedule.)