Yeah, you're right. How dare a guy risk his own life for the sake of doing what's right and telling us about the injustices of the United Stated Government we otherwise would have never been told or heard about. How dare someone like Bradley Manning stand up for the people, how dare he stand up for the truth... If the Government are killing innocent people and leading the public astray unless they tell us, we don't have the right to know the truth, right? This guy is only looking at spending the rest of his life in prison for the sake of letting people know what was happening, no big deal.
I'll be back later, just going to turn on my TV and watch some Fox News. You like that channel too? So informative and they always tell us the truth, who needs Wikileaks when we have unbiased televised news? Maybe we can watch it together sometime, eat some genetically modified corn, polish our military grade automatic guns and sip on fluorinated water, it'll be great.
Any thoughts on the Afghan civilians that US patrols were keeping a protective eye on because those civilians were doing things that would make them Taliban targets if the Taliban found out (such as cooperating with the Afghan government, or helping girls go to school). The reports of those patrols contained the names, addresses, and GPS coordinates of those civilians. Manning's leak basically gave the Taliban a target list of such people.
How about human rights workers and democracy activists in repressive regimes like Iran, who rely on keeping anonymous to avoid jail, torture, and execution? Some of them secretly asked US diplomats for help. Well, secret until Manning released diplomatic cables concerning those requests.
The above people were already in danger--educating girls in Afghanistan, or working underground against Iran is risky business--so we can't say for SURE that any deaths of such people since the leaks were due to information from the leaks, but the odds are pretty damn good that some were.
What specific things in the leaks do you think were important enough to justify endangering and very likely killing innocent people such as those Afghan civilians, or freedom fighters in repressive regimes?
Any thoughts on continuing to use this rhetoric despite a lack of any reports that any one of these supposed people got so much as a papercut in the aftermath, despite all the fear mongering suggesting that those people might be "in serious trouble soon" shortly after the release?
But it's also common sense, right? It is not controversial that the Taliban operate death squads. If you want to say NATO does too, fine, but that doesn't change the implications of the document dump. It does in fact create a list of specific people subject to reprisal killings by a group that is world famous for targeted reprisal killings on a scale even the US Army (in your least charitable interpretation) would have difficulty rivaling.
Still another response to your criticism is that you've set an unreasonably high bar. How many Pashtun residence of Paktia province do you know? I don't know many. How well reported to you think Ghazni province is compared to LA County? You're suggesting that we not take harm seriously until an extremely thin layer of journalists can document that harm carefully. Well, that's never going to happen. 60% of every Pashtun person identified by the document dump could already have been murdered and we wouldn't know.
History suggests that this concern is more than legitimate. How good do you feel the accounting has been for death squads in South America?
Julian Assange is alleged to have sat in a room full of journalists and said "Well, they're informants. So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." That seems like an easy claim for some journalist who was at the table to have knocked down. Has that happened, or is it likely that Assange actually said that? The journalist who made that allegation was David Leigh, investigations editor or The Guardian. FRONTLINE ran the claim in their documentary. Do you think FRONTLINE didn't fact-check?
The link says they are "scouring the reports," not documenting incidents. I'm wondering if the Taliban would be able to scour thousands of documents in English fast enough to catch anyone before they left town? Unlikely.
I also remember we were warned they were coming before they actually came.
Although you didn't say that this link contradicts my point (being, there are no reports anyone was hurt), I assume that is why you pasted it. I will point out that it also contains no such reports, and doesn't contradict my point.
> But it's also common sense, right? It is not controversial that the Taliban operate death squads. If you want to say NATO does too, fine, but that doesn't change the implications of the document dump. It does in fact create a list of specific people subject to reprisal killings by a group that is world famous for targeted reprisal killings on a scale even the US Army (in your least charitable interpretation) would have difficulty rivaling.
This is not a discussion about whether the US Army or the Taliban is worse. I'm not really interested in taking a position on that. You're kind of creating a straw man there.
> Still another response to your criticism is that you've set an unreasonably high bar. How many Pashtun residence of Paktia province do you know? I don't know many. How well reported to you think Ghazni province is compared to LA County? You're suggesting that we not take harm seriously until an extremely thin layer of journalists can document that harm carefully. Well, that's never going to happen. 60% of every Pashtun person identified by the document dump could already have been murdered and we wouldn't know.
I feel like although this makes sense, you didn't actually think about what you are suggesting. Yes, I do believe that in order to claim that someone is responsible for people getting hurt, you need some indication that it actually happened. Speculating about what horrible things could have happened is essentially an unbounded thought experiment that has no relevance. We have enough actual problems to worry about, let's not waste resources over hypothetical problems.
Note that I didn't even set a bar - I'm just pointing out that there hasn't even been a whisper of an actual papercut from a friend of a friend. Nothing. Given the propensity of people on both sides to exaggerate in order to further their agendas, the fact that there was nothing reported speaks volumes to me anyway.
Sure, it's common sense that they're going to look for traitors in the documents, but it's within the bounds of reason that one could take the position that they had a high probability of getting out of harms way, relative to the greater good that said person feels would come of releasing the documents. Of course, this is taking a chance, and reasonable people can disagree about whether or not that was acceptable risk. In this case, however, the "for releasing" position would have been correct as far as anybody seems to know.
> Julian Assange is alleged to have sat in a room full of journalists and said "Well, they're informants. So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." That seems like an easy claim for some journalist who was at the table to have knocked down. Has that happened, or is it likely that Assange actually said that? The journalist who made that allegation was David Leigh, investigations editor or The Guardian. FRONTLINE ran the claim in their documentary. Do you think FRONTLINE didn't fact-check?
What does a statement made by Julian Assange have to do with this?
I'm saying it's invalid reasoning to continue making serious attacks based on what "might happen", especially when the time during which said incidents would likely occur has now passed, and it never did happen as far as anyone seems to know.
The particular claim that I am addressing charges that his decision potentially caused unacceptable collateral damage. I am not taking a position on whether or not releasing the documents was justified or whether or not Assange is an egomaniac who doesn't shower. If one's position is that he should not have released these, it's bullshit to justify that position with this particular claim.
These points are fair game, but you entered the thread by asking why 'tzs would continue to use the "rhetoric" of harm from the document dump, and so the goal line here is "reasons a reasonable person would believe the document dump would be harmful". And so those reasons include:
* The Taliban is likely to kill Afghans with minimal provocation, having done so on innumerable occasions in the past.
* Even if the Taliban had done so hundreds of times directly in response to the Wikileaks dump, it's likely we would never have heard about it.
* The poor harm minimization concern was one expressed by many journalists, including those ideologically close to Wikileaks.
* The leader of Wikileaks has been reported as ambivalent to the concern, which calls into question the diligence with which anything they published was redacted.
These are reasons a reasonable person might evoke harm from the document dump. They are not dispositive of harm having occurred. It would be difficult in any circumstances to dispose of that question one way or the other.
The comparison between the Taliban and the US Army was itchy trigger finger debate tactic stuff from me. Sorry.
Apropos nothing: I really do not like Julian Assange. But I can't think of a way anything he did was criminal (extremely unethical: yes) and I would be offended and upset if he was the target of reprisals from the US Government. Weirdly enough, given how sympathetic Bradley Manning seems to be to people, I have no trouble at all understanding how he could be a criminal. He dropped a gigantic collection of documents he could not possibly have read or likely even understood to an anonymous third party on the Internet. Most of what we know today about Wikileaks (and the basis for most people's opinions about the Manning leak) are based on the result of the leak, and weren't known in January 2010.
I covered this. To repeat, we probably won't ever get proof of any particular death from the leaks, but we knew the leaks included information on groups of people that we know bad guys were actively seeking out for jailing, torturing, and killing, and so the odds are high that some are or will be killed from the leaks.
It's similar to the way we can conclude that smoking has killed people via lung cancer, even though it is impossible or nearly so to pin any particular lung cancer death on smoking. People get lung cancer who do not smoke and do not spend time with smokers, and so any particular death might be due to one of those instances of lung cancer.
There's also common sense. The Taliban is known to target people who they discover are committing certain acts that they consider to be offenses (which is why US forces were keeping an eye on those people, and thus why those people turned up in US reports). It seems unlikely that they would consider, say, educating girls, to no longer be an offense if they first learn about it through a leaked US report.
If you don't get proof that someone died, you have to charge him with something other than contributing to someone's death.
The other side can also do thought experiments bounded by "common sense." It's common sense that anyone who was an informant knew that their cover was blown and they got out of harms way ASAP. It's common sense that during the time before the release, when the US Gov was calling up foreign governments to let them know a bad leak was on the way, they also called up their informants.
It's also worth noting that only an extremely small percentage of the content contained identifiable information. Most of it wasn't related to informants at all.
Your claim that the odds are high that some are or will be killed from the leaks would be questionable at the time of release, and now that we have a few years of history, fails even a preponderance of evidence standard of proof. For such a serious claim, I personally feel that it warrants at least that.
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant" --U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
Would we really go to war if we knew the true extent of human suffering? Maybe, but visibility to such suffering at least allows people to feel sympathy, instead of simply being ignorant to suffering.
So we should have updated detailed progress on our investigation of Osama Bin Laden and other criminals? Upload our latest nuclear technology as how-to videos on youtube?
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant" --U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
Look a Supreme Court justice agrees with that because I put an out of context quote from him.
He also leaked a trove of diplomatic communications that revealed corruption all over the world. I'd imagine many in Tunisia would consider Manning a hero.
> No idea why people call this guy a hero. If you read any history of any war, innocent people die because of human error.
You mostly don't read about innocent people dying in war. It's expected and nobody really cares. History books talk about how amazing the Roman or British empires were. When did you ever read anything more than vague lip-service about all the killing of innocent people that involved?
Killing people with airplanes is not categorically known as "terror" rather than "war." Lots of people were killed with airplanes in World War I, but while it was terrifying, WWI is pretty universally known as a war. So I don't take your point.
Didn't he basically just dump a bunch of classified information, without actually going through it to see if it was worth releasing or if somethings were worth omitting from the release?
How do you figure that? He gave us access to information that we have a right to, so that we can make our own informed decisions. Do you remember the Pentagon Papers and the effect they had on the Vietnam War? In my mind he's a true patriot.
> He gave us access to information that we have a right to
I've heard this said quite a bit but am way too ignorant about it to form a logical opinion or know where to find more information. Basically, what information from the Gov't do we have a right to? All of it? Some of it?
I know there are classified documents that are kinda essential to keeping people safe that would be better left confidential, but they eventually make it out, albeit heavily redacted. Is there some quick-reference (worth a shot..) or a place of reference I could at least start my journey? There's a lot of misinformation out there, especially regarding this case specifically.
When your tax dollars are paying for military strikes, and you yourself are then made a target by angry foreigners blaming you for supporting your own government, I'd say you have a right to know what "they" are doing.
How much? As much is needed for everyone to have a rationalised discussion. As I write this I realise that with media outlets such as FOX, that makes it pretty hard.
As Bradley Manning said, most military information has a tactical shelf life of 48-72 hours, after that most information can (and should) be released. Perhaps a more transparent/accountable military would be a harder target for fundamentalists to rally support against, but I wouldn't actually know.
He's making the argument that there exist certain documents that are "better left confidential", and that those documents "eventually make it out". Both statements are highly contestable, and I've offered a fairly extensive source by a Pulitzer prize winner to contradict those points.
His final statement is ironic. We're talking about a man (Manning) who risked his life to uncover information that the government tried to conceal by spreading misinformation. The existence of misinformation about Manning's own story is nothing if not ironic. It's not an insult - to Obama, perhaps, but not OP - and my apologies if anybody took that way. However, taking the time to look me up on Twitter just to call me a 'prick' certainly doesn't offer anything valuable to the discussion and does nothing to keep the level of discourse on HN high.
Well, there were some of that information, but there were also secret cables which had little to do with any war crimes. He could have just released the videos and not the other stuff, if you wanted to argue the war crimes angle.
Finally, I think I agree with others. If you truly believe in your actions, you take responsibility, no matter the consequences. Such is how many in the war of independence saw it. They knew that if the British caught them, they'd likely be tried as traitors. Not saying all revolutions are have 'honorable causes'. Just saying it's honorable to take responsibility for what one does to further one's beliefs, even if the actions are not honorable, depending on view.
