Responding to the Two-Inch Crowd on Assange
2nd December 2010
The Hague Conventions of 1907 (Article 31) declared that if you happened to be able to catch a spy alive, you were supposed to give them a trial before executing them; however, nothing contained therein indicated that the trial had to be anything more than a field military tribunal. This tribunal could be limited to the issue of whether the person you caught was, in fact, guilty of the espionage in question. Of course, if you have to kill the spy to prevent ongoing espionage, well, them’s the breaks.
And there’s your jihadis and your Somali pirates. Dead men walking.
A “spy” is defined under the same conventions as one who “acting clandestinely or on false pretences, [] obtains or endeavours to obtain information in the zone of operations of a belligerent, with the intention of communicating it to the hostile party.” This, of course, is a textbook explanation of what Assange has done, during the course of paying Manning (and perhaps others) to illegally and clandestinely obtain information on America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and communicate them to any and all hostile parties with access to the Internet. And from all indication (based on his own words and promises) he intends to continue doing it for as long as he can escape prosecution for being a rapist. Therefore, if we can catch him alive, then I suppose he must be given a field tribunal of some sort – it’s not all bad, though, because that will give us the opportunity to kill him in a way less painless than a small-caliber round to the back of the head. Of course, I’d certainly never suggest torturing him to death – perish the thought. If the bastard runs, forcing us to kill him, well, they shoot horses, don’t they?
That sums up my position on the subject pretty well.
As a side note, I have been informed that some exceptionally ignorant people are referring to Pfc. Bradley Manning as a “whistleblower.” Folks, if Bradley Manning is a whistleblower, so was Aldrich Ames. The word “spy” has a meaning, it is applicable to an identifiable class of people (including both Ames and Manning) and it is an insult to “whistleblowers” to associate them with this filth. The willingness of some to use “whistleblower” as applied to Manning is just further evidence that to some people, anyone who harms America’s military can’t possibly be anything other than a hero.