Hacker News Reader

Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

The Manning leaks were hugely irresponsible. While whistleblowing is a vital activity, the data dumps Manning pulled from the military network and State Department were unredacted raw dumps. They catalyzed Arab Spring by pushing the delicate realm of international diplomacy into the eyes of the public, leading to hundreds of deaths and, fundamentally, no real change. Possibly setting back democracy in the Middle East by a generation or so.

I like Manning as a person, but state secrets exist for a reason and she deserved to be imprisoned for her crimes.

View on HN

> The Manning leaks were hugely irresponsible. While whistleblowing is a vital activity, the data dumps Manning pulled from the military network and State Department were unredacted raw dumps.

WikiLeaks tried to get the Pentagon to help them redact documents[1]. They refused to do so knowing there would be people like you accusing WikiLeaks/Manning of wrongdoing here.

> I like Manning as a person, but state secrets exist for a reason and she deserved to be imprisoned for her crimes.

You do realize she shed light on war crimes right? Do you consider war crimes 'state secrets' that 'exist for a reason'?

The reason, oftentimes, is simply to hide wrongdoing, as was the case here. The fact Manning was imprisoned, (and tortured), while the killers of civilians and journalists she exposed were not shows that this is not a just system. It's designed to chill whileblowers and allow atrocities to continue, unpunished.

How anyone could support that is beyond me.

1 - https://www.salon.com/2010/08/20/wikileaks_5/

The military leaks did shed light on (possible; there is dispute in the international community) war crimes, and had Manning only leaked those specific videos, my opinion would be very different.

The State Department cable leaks were grossly irresponsible, as were most of the rest of the military intel leaks. She slurped and dumped without understanding of the ramifications of divulging all that information, which can endanger her fellow soldiers in the field, who had not committed war crimes. That she appears to have gotten lucky and it did not, in fact, endanger soldiers in the field is irrelevant to the reason such a slurp-and-dump is a court-martial offense.

I think reasonable people can disagree on whether, in aggregate, she did more harm than good. She shed light on (what we would want to be) senseless deaths of several civilians in a military theater, and separate from that, she catalyzed multiple revolutions resulting in the deaths of hundreds.

>You do realize she shed light on war crimes right? Do you consider war crimes 'state secrets' that 'exist for a reason'?

What warcrimes? Please be specific. Because if you're talking about that Helicopter gunship video, that was not a warcrime, and was selectively edited by Wikileaks to try to make it look worse. All of which made Wikileak's claims far more dubious.

> Because if you're talking about that Helicopter gunship video, that was not a warcrime

Since when is killing journalists not a warcrime?

Wikipedia gives a pretty good summary of how one arrives at that conclusion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstri... --- the short form is that the laws around war crimes give broad leeway to soldiers in the field interpreting a situation on the ground, and from the point of view of the gunship, they may have believed they were firing on attackers attempting to reach RPGs in the vehicle. This is one of the tragedies of modern insurgency warfare... Since nobody's in uniform, how can one be sure that the person in civilian clothing crawling through the operation is trying to escape or going for a concealed weapon?

I'm personally inclined to agree with Mark Taylor that "...what this video shows is really a case that challenges whether the laws of war are strict enough."

Within the US, there is a similar broad cultural argument ongoing on whether laws protecting police officers err too far on the side of assuming the cops' in-the-field interpretation of what happened should guide how the law understands what happened.

The Apache gunner did not know that they were firing on a journalist, they had believed they were engaging a legal target and were doing so within given rules of engagement. Which is legal. It's a tragedy that they were mis-identified, but again, not a warcrime. Had they known they were non combatants and fired on them still, that would have been a warcrime.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com