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Showing posts from April, 2015

Justice is blind but the scale is rigged when it comes to whistleblowers.

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General David Petraeus was sentenced to two years probation and a $100K fine for leaking classified information (link to  plea deal ). This sentence is nothing short of an insult to the justice system in the United States. It is a clear example of how the justice system in the United States is rigged.  Let us recall what got Petraeus into this mess by looking at two things - i. What did he leak? ii. What was intention for leaking the information?  What did he leak? Petraeus leaked names of covert operatives, war plans for US forces, and detailed discussion with senior officials including the US President. This information was contained in notebooks that Petraeus kept for himself. He then gave Paula Broadwell access to these notebooks to help her write his biography. The information contained in those notebooks are highly classified by any standard and had the potential of endangering US covert operatives.  When Chelsea Manning leaked the Afghan war-logs to WikiLeaks th

Book # 2 - A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

This post is long delayed. I apologize. I will be honest, this book was hard to read but it was rewarding at the end. One of the biggest challenge for me in reading this book was the language used. It was written in old 19th Century English where the sentence construction is totally different from what I am used to. Let me give you an example: He is alive. Greatly changed, it is too probable; almost a wreck, it is possible; though we will hope the best. Still, alive. Your father has been taken to the house of an old servant in Paris, and we are going there: I, to identify him if I can: you, to restore him to life, love, duty, rest, comfort. I found it hard reading these types of sentences, and the book was full of it. What I noticed is that the sentences made it hard for me to get a feel of the ideas flowing. I had to stop a few times and re-read some sentences to fully understand them. Maybe this was intentional to convey a sense of uncertainty as the story unfolded and as the ch