Obama On WikiLeaks Source Bradley Manning:"He Broke The Law"

President Obama has made his feelings clear about alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning–though likely not in the way he intended.

In a conversation following a fundraising speech in San Francisco Thursday, the president was filmed responding to some impromptu questions about Manning’s suspected leak of several massive collections of classified State Department and military data to WikiLeaks.

I’ve done my best to transcribe the short clip, with a couple of unintelligible gaps and several interruptions by his interviewer, who wasn’t caught on camera and whose words are largely missed by the microphone.

[START TRANSCRIPTION]

People can have philosophical views about…

[Questioner: unintelligible]

No, no, but look, I can’t conduct diplomacy on an open source. That’s not how…the world works. If you’re in the military, and…I have to abide by certain classified information. If I was to release stuff, information that I’m not authorized to release, I’m breaking the law…We’re a nation of laws. We don’t individually make our own decisions about how the laws operate…

He broke the law.

[Questioner: 'You can make it harder to break the law.']

Well, what he did was he dumped…

[Questioner: something about President Nixon's prosecution of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg]

It wasn’t the same thing. What Ellsberg released wasn’t classified in the same way. So. Anyway. Alright.

[END TRANSCRIPTION]


From: http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2011/04/22/video-of-obama-on-bradley-manning-he-broke-the-law/

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