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.

Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told a local radio station on Monday that the charges against Pvt. Bradley Manning are worthy of capital punishment.

"We know for a fact that people will likely be killed because of this information being disclosed," he told Michigan-based WHMI. "That's pretty serious. If they don't charge him with treason, they ought to charge him with murder.

"I argue the death penalty clearly should be considered here," he said. "He clearly aided the enemy to what may result in the death of U.S. soldiers . . . If that is not a capital offense, I don't know what is."

Manning is being held at the Quantico Marine Corps Base in northern Virginia, awaiting possible trial on 12 offenses.

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.

"He put soldiers at risk who are out there fighting for their country," Rogers said. "And he put people who are cooperating with the United States government clearly at risk -- them forever. Our soldiers will be out of that combat zone one day; those folks will never be."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have called the release of the documents that WikiLeaks calls its "Afghan War Diary" deeply damaging and potentially life-threatening for Afghan informants or others who have taken risks to help the U.S. and NATO war effort.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has dismissed allegations that innocent people or informants had been put in danger by the publication of the documents.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/03/congressman-calls-execution-wikileaks-whistleblower/?test=latestnews

He better be charged with treason, and the Death penalty is definately warrented.

Agreed.

If he's proven guilty of being the one who leaked these documents, I have no problem with him being sentenced to being immediately and permanently oxygen-deprived. This is what SHOULD happen to the people at the New York Times and other 'media' that PUBLISH national secrets. It's called an 'object lesson'. Matter of fact, I have no problem with putting Julian Assange in there to make it a 'two-fer' ...

Ah, the over-reactionary pseudo-patriotic zealots are at it again! Maybe if they actually read about wikileaks, they'll find that the media spin on this is just that-spin. The documents on wikileaks didn't reveal any "new" information or reveal sources. They just confirm what everyone already knew-that the "war" is going badly. It's not the Pentagon Papers or anything even remotely as secret.

As propublica writes,
"What's crucially different from the Pentagon Papers

In terms of important disclosures, it's not even close, with the historical importance of today's documents likely to be relatively minor, and that of the Pentagon Papers enormous. The most significant revelations today include the Taliban's limited use of heat-seeking missiles (which had been previously reported, though little-noticed), and the Pakistani intelligence service's constant double-dealing and occasional cooperation with the Taliban (long the subject of news stories, and even of some official complaints).

In 1971, in contrast, the Pentagon Papers revealed a host of important discrepancies between the public posture of the U.S. government with respect to Vietnam and the truth -- from the Truman administration, through the times of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson.

These included Johnson's dissembling during the 1964 presidential campaign and in the run-up to the key decision in 1965 to send large numbers of combat troops, as well as confirmation of U.S. involvement in the 1963 coup against South Vietnamese premier Ngo Dinh Diem. And perhaps most famously, was the evidence that the administration had decided to escalate the war before the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution gave it the authority to do so.

There are many reasons for the differences between these two troves of documents, but perhaps the most important is that today's documents provide a "ground-level" view of the war, while the Pentagon Papers offered a classic "top-down" perspective. Wars are fought on the ground, and the perspective such a view provides can be invaluable. But many of a war's key secrets, especially in political terms, are generated at the top."

P.S. in case you didn't know, wikileaks also has another bundle of secret documents-which it has threatened to release if anything happens to Assange. Hooray for Assange! End the Military-Industrial complex!

Nice try at defending the treasonous li'l bastid ... no cigar. He's not worth having planaria worms eat him after his death.

What treason? Do you even know the legal definition of treason? There was no treason here. It's just the Regime and the Military industrial complex's incompetence and lies being aired for the world to see.

You're not the only clever puppy in the litter, y'know ... it IS treason. Go peddle your Progressive / Socialist pap to someone who might buy that crap ...

Actually, treason is: "The Constitution of the United States, Art. III, defines treason against the United States to consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid or comfort. This offence is punished with death. By the same article of the Constitution, no person shall be convicted of treason, unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court."

What wikileaks did is nowhere CLOSE to this.

You think the Constitution is "Progressive/Socialist"? You really have a lot to learn before you can even BEGIN to argue with me on this.

I'll have you know, I'm a Voluntaryist, and find socialists pathetic, ignorant little people-just as pathetic as the war mongering fascists in the GOP. Perhaps you could stick to the issue at hand and stop the childish, insulting labels?

Oh. Well, I guess I've been put in my place with your superior smarts, eh ... ? I know my betters, yes, I do, massah ... JeezUS ... talk about condescension in action ... You have YOUR view - I have MY view ... he's a traitor. All your finely-spun 'logic' and 'Voluntaryism' philosophy changes nothing when information that is SUPPOSED to remain confidential or secret is divulged and lives are lost as a result. Tweak it all y' want, you're wrong.

the american people are the only ones who didnt know what was going on over there. The Iraqi and Afghans live it everyday. Maybe you should read the wiki leaks or at least brows them. You may re-evaluate some of your opinions.

You're the one doing the "tweaking" here, thus you are in fact wrong. The data Assange released was not new to anyone. Even Obama claims that the leak didn't reveal anything new.

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/111121-obama-insists-wikileaks-didnt-reveal-anything-that-wasnt-known

P.S. yes, I have put you in your place with my superior smarts. Now stay there, and hopefully you'll learn a thing or two.

Doesn't matter. What where turned over to Wikileaks, known or not was declared Top Secret and even higher. Giving this materials to ANYONE who doesn't have the clearance to have them is a crime, and letting the enemy see them, or another country is considered treason, which is punishable by death.

trea·son audio (trzn) KEY

NOUN:

1. Violation of allegiance toward one's country or sovereign, especially the betrayal of one's country by waging war against it or by consciously and purposely acting to aid its enemies.
2. A betrayal of trust or confidence.

ETYMOLOGY:
Middle English, from Anglo-Norman treson, from Latin trditi, trditin-, a handing over ; see tradition
Thesaurus: synonyms for treason

The matter at hand is Constitutional law, not what your layman's dictionary says. It is a matter of fact that legal terms like treason have special definitions for legal use. Check out a legal dictionary when you're in the bookstore.

IOW, you've proved nothing.

If we weren't the "big warmongering" country we have been of late and decided to give peace a chance, there wouldn't be anything to leak.

That said, leaks have to be expected. Journalism is for the most part sensationalism. To be shocking, you have to dig and look for the most outrageous stories to put out there.

This is just another one.

Hell, if our government does the "leaking" as has happened in the recent past, it isn't treason then.

It needs to be fair.

If the information gets out, it gets out.

What else can you do?

This will not be the last time and definitely won't be the worst of it either.

I love the work Warmonger, it mak'es me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Please say it again.

Not to mention that the founder of Wikileaks is a rapist too.

You ask, "if the information gets out it gets out,what can you do?" I say you fry the bastards who let the information out. I do not care what your job is, I do not care what your position is, who yo daddy is or who yo momma is, if yo let something out that is deemed secret, then you should be punished for it. If yo are shown as receiving said information, yo need to be punished as an accomplice to the fact. If you have received it and make it more available to those unauthorized to know of it, Then yo are guilty as the original leaker and need to be fried for leaking secrets.


Wow, what a concept? Punishing a politician when he/she screws up. What will happen to America then?