On treason, traitors and what have you

The other point of view is worth chewing on.  Listening and reading  what the other side has to say is an acquired taste.  After all, if we really want to understand how  people act in all sort of different ways because they have a crisis of conscience ... look no further than people in the military and everybody connected with wars and death.

Rob Urie writing at CounterPunch:
.....What Bradley Manning has admitted he is guilty of   is releasing a large quantity of official documents of great importance to the American people in understanding the actions of ‘their’ government. The video footage he provided (it had been previously released by other sources) of U.S. helicopter gunners casually slaughtering innocent Iraqi civilians and reporters and grievously injuring young children made concrete the insane slaughter George W. Bush had unleashed. And while in terms of real politick these are crimes of empire that fit both the trajectory and continuum of American history, they are also crimes committed by specific people against specific people, the material foundation that ties legal principles to the acts they proscribe. When associated with Mr. Obama’s ‘kill lists’ that guide his murders conducted without due process, with his ‘signature strikes’ that are war crimes under international law, with his illegal surveillance of citizens here and abroad, and with his torture of illegally detained persons at America’s gulag at Guantanamo Bay, Mr. Obama has perpetuated and expanded Mr. Bush’s legacy of rogue criminality.......

.....The charge of espionage, of acting on behalf of a ‘foreign’ power to undermine the United States, goes some distance toward illuminating the dynamic at work here—the foreign power in whose interests Bradley Manning, in his own words, was acting is the American people. You need not agree with his actions to accede this point. Mr. Manning reportedly joined the military in earnest to support the interests of the U.S. through military service. What Mr. Manning found, again from his own words, was U.S. officials acting against what he believed to be the interests of the American people..........

........ American and British intelligence overthrew the democratically elected and democratically acting government in Iran to create a police-state hell complete with cartoon-puppet leaders and externally written ‘history’ to secure oil for British Petroleum. When the Iranian people rebelled by supporting religious-political leadership that effectively tossed the Anglo-American oil mafia out, the oil mafia responded by turning to Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party in Iraq and arming it to launch a war of aggression against Iran decidedly not in either Iraq’s or Iran’s interests. A decade later the George H.W. Bush administration invaded Iraq under false pretenses and buried upwards of 200,000 Iraqi conscripts in the desert. And a decade later still baby Bush invaded Iraq under the pretext of recovering the weapons Poppy (George H.W.) Bush had provided and in so doing killed and displaced upwards of five million people...........