421–430 of 484 posts
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You should at least attempt to follow the chain of command before deciding to break it.
Even when they're guaranteed to deny you and take away your copies of all the evidence?
Nor the Pfc. who leaked details of a heinous rape/murder/arson committed by U.S. troops in Iraq.
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The difference however is Abu Ghraib didn't put intelligence sources at risk The hell it didn't. (I stopped reading there, so maybe you made some good points later on.) By discarding any pretense of adherence to the Geneva Convention, Abu Ghraib put every US soldier at risk.
> Abu Ghraib put every US soldier at risk. At risk of what? What was already happening to both soldiers and civilians? You can't mean torture, death, or imprisonment. Hell, the Taliban and the like were doing far, far worse already. So, I'm honestly curious, what was the increased risk? > so maybe you made some good points later on. The OP made mention of how Manning's leak directly led to intelligence sources impris…
For one thing, not all of the US's potential adversaries are radical Islamists. In future conventional wars, we will need the moral authority to demand that our prisoners be treated in accordance with international laws and treaty obligations. Debacles like Abu Ghraib -- to say nothing of the Iraq war in general -- rob us of that moral authority, in much the same way that the Roman Catholic Church loses some of its moral authority every time another child sex abuse case comes to light. To occupy the high ground, you must first take it.
The OP made mention of how Manning's leak directly led to intelligence sources imprisonment and death.
No, orchestrating a bogus public health campaign led to Afridi's imprisonment. As far as I'm concerned, Afridi can take his place next to Mengele in medical infamy.
Manning did an unalloyed good thing in bringing the CIA's tactic to light [1]. I want foreign operatives to tell the Agency to fuck off when they come up with ideas like, "Hey, let's start a vaccination program so we can subvert the local populace and find our bad guy."
You seem to think that the ends justify the means. That's great, as long as you have perfect knowledge of future consequences. In that sense, both the US government and Bradley Manning made the same logical error. The difference is, his actions had some positive consequences as well as negative ones.
[1]: If, in fact, he did. There seems to be some disagreement with briandear's (lack of a) citation on this.
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No, this is the Armed Forces code of conduct. He broke the laws of his organization, was before a court of that same org. This is internal. Once you wear a uniform, other rules apply. secrecy has a different impact, loyalty as well. Civilians might not like it or even understand, but Manning hopefully did when he chose to join the Armed Forces. Snowden is different, just a contractor. But Manning joined the club, bro…
> Not so long ago he would have been executed for it, 35 is a soft ruling. That is a demonstrably false statement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
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No, this is the Armed Forces code of conduct. He broke the laws of his organization, was before a court of that same org. This is internal. Once you wear a uniform, other rules apply. secrecy has a different impact, loyalty as well. Civilians might not like it or even understand, but Manning hopefully did when he chose to join the Armed Forces. Snowden is different, just a contractor. But Manning joined the club, bro…
If the law is selectively applied, it's not the rule of law. I think you'll find a lot of people here will think that they threw the book at him, because he challenged the system. And Snowden is actually in the same boat here. He's not military, but he had clearance, so he's liable for quite a bit. I'm not sure which court would trial him, so there might be some differences.
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> but I'd also expect some clemency given that the release was clearly in the public interest and revealed many unlawful orders and coverups. The chain of command issuing the unlawful orders and participating in the coverups is unlikely to agree that revealing those things is in the "public interest". Which is kind of the fundamental problems that whistleblowers always face (whether or not formal protections are in p…
The military trials of which you speak deal with military penal code as set out by Congress, not by the President. Likewise the trials are overseen in the end by the civilian Supreme Court. In the actual military the untoward influence (real or perceived) of the convening officer on the outcome of the case is a B.F.D., just witness all the sexual assault/harassment cases that were being upended by Obama's condemnatio…
Passing the laws is not being part of the process of applying them (its also inaccurate to say that the UCMJ is "set out by Congress, not the President", since the current version of the UCMJ wasn't adopted over a Presidential veto.)
> Likewise the trials are overseen in the end by the civilian Supreme Court.
Which, given the length (both procedurally and temporally) of the appeal chain is a far more distant involvement of a non-executive actor than is the case in civilian trials.
> You're right that an independent actor is what is needed in general, but Col. Lind does not report to the President on this, she reports to the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington
The existence of intervening steps on the chain of command does not make a military officer independent of the Commander-in-Chief.
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The problem with your argument is that it's not that he blew the whistle, it's that he didn't do it in a responsible manner. Also, whistleblowing doesn't always include breaking a law or contract. Also, he also exposed things that WEREN'T wrongdoing, and even the "wrong" things he "exposed" were pretty much already known and "wrong" is VERY subjective in this circumstance. The "wrongdoing" was not in what happened in…
> And really, the thing that got him most in trouble were the hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables that exposed no wrongdoing You've clearly not read the cables. they were responsible for at least two revolutions [1][2], and we're still learning from them. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/13/amnesty-interna... [2] http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/wikihistory-did-l...
And either way I wouldn't be so quick to claim that inciting those revolutions is on the balance a positive thing for either Manning or Wikileaks, for the same reason that toppling Saddam's despotic regime was not (on the balance) a good thing.
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The difference however is Abu Ghraib didn't put intelligence sources at risk The hell it didn't. (I stopped reading there, so maybe you made some good points later on.) By discarding any pretense of adherence to the Geneva Convention, Abu Ghraib put every US soldier at risk.
> Abu Ghraib put every US soldier at risk. At risk of what? What was already happening to both soldiers and civilians? You can't mean torture, death, or imprisonment. Hell, the Taliban and the like were doing far, far worse already. So, I'm honestly curious, what was the increased risk? > so maybe you made some good points later on. The OP made mention of how Manning's leak directly led to intelligence sources impris…
In the specific case of soldiers in Iraq, at risk of radicalisation of that part of the population which, prior to the events at Abu Ghraib and them becoming known in Iraq (which occurred before they were leaked in the West), had been supportive (or at least tolerant) of the occupation.
For the rest of the military, a greater risk of hostile populations and bigger psyops advantages for adversaries in foreign operations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, this is the Armed Forces code of conduct. He broke the laws of his organization, was before a court of that same org. This is internal. Once you wear a uniform, other rules apply. secrecy has a different impact, loyalty as well. Civilians might not like it or even understand, but Manning hopefully did when he chose to join the Armed Forces. Snowden is different, just a contractor. But Manning joined the club, bro…
Do the rules prohibit, say, a General lying to Congress?
Manning was either guilty of not guilty of the things he was charged with, and that is independent of what some General says to Congress. If the system does not ensure equal justice then the system should be fixed, but that would not change anything relating to Manning's actions and the consequences of those actions.
You'd think with as many web devs as we have on HN that more people would understand stateless protocols and independent transactions.
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Bradley Manning released a dump of over 700,000 files. Although there were some documents that revealed possible war crimes, there was no do due diligence performed to verify that the rest of the files were not putting people in danger. I'm curious as to how people are justifying those actions? If someone releases a huge dump of classified files, without any possible war crimes, would we still defend them?
> If someone releases a huge dump of classified files, without any possible war crimes, would we still defend them? I would. I don't trust the government to decide what should and shouldn't be confidential, and I'd be curious to hear any justifications for why the government deserves even the slightest bit of trust.
What other crimes would you then permit because you don't trust the government? Would it be OK to stab soldiers then? They work the government. How about robbing postal workers? Which crimes no longer are crimes when the government is the victim, and which rules do you use to determine that?
And then take the same question and apply it to corporations. You may not trust Google, for instance; would you say that it's OK then for a Google employee to leak 700,000 random emails from GMail because that would embarrass Google? If not, why is your logic different here?
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The difference however is Abu Ghraib didn't put intelligence sources at risk The hell it didn't. (I stopped reading there, so maybe you made some good points later on.) By discarding any pretense of adherence to the Geneva Convention, Abu Ghraib put every US soldier at risk.
> Abu Ghraib put every US soldier at risk. At risk of what? What was already happening to both soldiers and civilians? You can't mean torture, death, or imprisonment. Hell, the Taliban and the like were doing far, far worse already. So, I'm honestly curious, what was the increased risk? > so maybe you made some good points later on. The OP made mention of how Manning's leak directly led to intelligence sources impris…
just because someone mentions something, does not make it true.
up is down.