The fact that the US murdered innocent civilians was highly embarrassing and hurt the interests of the US, not the fact that Manning leaked that information itself. Punish the murderers, not the messengers. The only people were actually harmed were the innocent children and journalists on the receiving end of US machine guns.
This exactly. Governments do need to be held accountable for secret crimes, secrecy should not be allowed to enable continuing those crimes. Exposing them was necessary, even if it was illegal.
I do think Manning was naive and sloppy for handing the whole thing over to Assange, though in her defense, Assange seemed fairly reasonable and responsible at the time. It's only after this enormous leak that he seems to have gone mad with power.
I can sleep a lot better tonight having read this thread of thoughts after some of the awfulness I just read over at reddit.
With this issue there is a remarkable degree of misinformation, as well as fascist ideology supporting the the surveillance state. These neverending, unechecked powers undermine civil rights and allow human rights abuses to go continue. And it's all wrapped in this package of 'a good liberal just supporting the good guys like Obama and Hillary that evil Assange is trying to destroy.' Assange is far from perfect, but I cannot understand how people do not fight back in solidarity with outrage against human and civil rights abuses.
It's called mortality :) people have X years to live and try to make the best of it and not everyone is ready to sacrifice that time for doing the right thing.
The simple fact that other people are unjustly suffering means that my mortality of x years is not the best. I think this alone should make everyone want to help make the world the best it can be. But empathy and love loses to selfishness and greed.
Thank you for your comments. You have it exactly right, re-affirming my hope that the world is not doomed. Another example in line with what you said, having secret prisons that we kidnapped people and took them to and tortured them during the second bush war in Iraq hurt the US. It hurt because because we had secret prisons.
In my opinion the solution to not being embarrassed is to not do embarrassing things. The person exposeing those things isn't in the wrong, you are.
Keep in mind all of the recent leaks have been from individuals and organizations that have supported domestic spying under the rationale "if you've got nothing to hide". Yet they hide in shadows and evidently misbehave when the public isn't looking.
"In my opinion the solution to not being embarrassed is to not do embarrassing things. "
That was the government's position against Snowden, Wikileaks, etc. Also called the "Safe if Nothing to Hide" fallacy. What secrets can cause damage in what ways is pretty broad and arbitrary. Interestingly, it applies to the government's schemes much like people's, private lives. We have to keep them in check more but that should be done by citizens leaning on various branches of government. Including groups doing something about problems in GAO reports.
Really easy to say, though, to never piss off any important person in any foreign country or company with one's private decisions or actions. Really hard to do, too.
I see what you're saying here but it might not be so simple. These types of countries are all competing doing all kinds of evil stuff to do so. All or most would have to be hit with whistleblowing & often for what you say to matter. What we've seen is large scale whistleblowing in some countries but not others. A few of those crying "Foul!" are almost certainly doing equivalent or worse but benefit from being the moral, high ground.
The result: a whistleblower for one just gives a competitive advantage to the others. So, both the country's policy and the whistleblower shifting people or investments to other scheming countries or companies are each causing damage.
A country is hit by whistleblowers when these people find their government doing things that are against their principles. That's much harder to happen when the people employed has no such thing.
The country is hit by "leakers" when arbitrary people on inside leak secrets for arbitrary reasons. Even the leakers themselves disagreed on morality of various things at various points. The problem is much broader and more subjective than you're hinting at if we adopted a policy of letting anyone leak anything they personally thought was bad. Especially if only one country in a world of nations competing was doing it.
The people of any country where would-be leakers are summarily executed for treason will not know what its government is hiding from them. Sometimes governments hide things for good reasons but, sometimes, the very crimes the government commits in order to protect the country's principles end up undermining those.
I dont disagree. Im pro leaking of evidence of crimes. That's whistleblowing. Manning did a lot more than that, though. So, your point is a strawman better suited for someone like Binney who only discussed corruption instead of huge, raw dump.
The more important question is: did the US murder innocent civilians? It's not about the cables or the messenger or the medium or the style and presentation, it's about the murdered innocent civilians.
The debt we owe Manning for exposing the fact that the US murdered innocent civilians far outweighs the damage she did by releasing the cables. The prosecution couldn't identify anyone who was harmed, beyond those innocents harmed by the US government machine guns, which wasn't Manning's fault.
When I was a kid, they were never innocent. They were all Russian agents and the puppet dictators put in place by the US were protecting their countries from communism.
A people deserves to know what their government did on their behalf.
