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A Michigan congressman said this week that if an Army private charged with leaking classified material to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks is found guilty, he should be sentenced to death.
"He releases this information to a third party who they say will make the determination that there's nothing harmful in it, while we know for a fact that there will be people that will likely be killed because of this information being disclosed," Rogers, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from the state of Michigan, said. "That's pretty serious," he added. "If they don't charge him with treason, they ought to charge him with murder."
He is accused of leaking a helicopter cockpit video from Iraq that WikiLeaks posted in April, and a classified cable from the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik, Iceland, dated Jan. 13, 2010, that also has appeared on WikiLeaks.
Manning also is charged with illegally obtaining more than 150,000 classified State Department cables and leaking more than 50 of them. It's not clear from the charges, though, whether the allegedly diverted documents were those published on the WikiLeaks site.
Originally posted by SUICIDEHK45
I understand that what Bradley Manning alledgedly did was illegal, but should he be put to death if found guilty? The answer to that is NO. If anything he should be given a medal and a hero's welcome home for helping people to realize what is really going on in Afghanistan and Iraq.
en.wikipedia.org...
In law, treason is the crime that covers some of the more serious acts of betrayal of one's sovereign or nation.
[snip]
In English law, high treason was punishable by being hanged, drawn and quartered (men) or burnt at the stake (women), or beheading (royalty and nobility). Treason was the only crime which attracted those penalties (until they were abolioshed in 1814, 1790 and 1973 respectively). The penalty was used by later monarchs against people who could reasonably be called traitors, although most modern jurists would call it excessive. Many of them would now just be considered dissidents.